


The Threshold

by Rend_Herring



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Feels, As in: Expanding from after CA:TWS, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, But basically.. hella pining, Canon-Typical Violence, Explicit Sexual Content, I feel like I should go ahead and make that clear now, I need a hug, Introspection, Love, M/M, Memory Loss, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, No Refractory Period, POV Bucky Barnes, POV Third Person Limited, Pining, Recovered Memories, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, annndd..?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-05-03
Packaged: 2020-02-16 18:20:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 33,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18696793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rend_Herring/pseuds/Rend_Herring
Summary: “Does it hurt?” Steve whispers.Everything hurts, Bucky wants to say; everything that’s been done, how he can’t take any of it back, the wrecked fragments of his mind, and the division between their bodies-- everything has its own bitter sting.“Yeah,” Bucky says, and tries not to think about the way Steve turns his hand back over, interlaces their fingers, and dips his forehead to rest against a metal wrist.





	The Threshold

**Author's Note:**

> *busts in through wall like Kool-Aid Man with a Captain America: The Winter Solider aftermath canon-deviation fic 5 years late* I'm here to fuck it all the way up you guys! I really hope this fic is readable because I have no idea how it got this long.. Anyways, a heads up: Like stated in tags, there will be some canon typical violence/torture/a little bit of blood in here. Nothing too gratuitous, but Bucky didn't have a great time during his captivity. One instance of minor self-surgery, again nothing wildly gory. And of course Bucky, our narrator here, is trying to work his way through trauma so themes of ptsd throughout. Also.. a touch of, uh, what I would call magical healing dick-adjacent trope, not because I'm lazy (which I am), but because what's the point of transformative media about superheroes if I can't slum my way into The Good Stuff™ So... good luck I guess?

The pain washes over him in paralytic waves.  Bucky knows he’s screaming, can hear the grating echo of it bouncing back at him from off the walls.  This isn’t the same sort of pain he experienced before under Zola’s hands. Injections and prodding that reduced him to a name and a rank firing over and over in his mouth like a gun going off.  Bucky could accept that torture, terrible and sometimes strange, but controllable. Whatever is happening to him now is definitely physical, Bucky can feel each agonized nerve pried open and raw, and he’s _cold,_ the kind of cold where his body crosses the signals and it begins to feel like being burned alive.  He’d feel a little this sometimes working the docks in winter, when the arctic wind would blow in from the north across the water and bite into every tattered hole in Bucky’s coat and gloves.

 _Your lips are pale,_ Steve would say when Bucky’d come home after work.  Bucky sucked his cold bottom lip into his mouth and Steve would immediately avert his eyes to peel off Bucky’s gloves instead.   _Least I can do is keep you from catching frostbite,_ and he’d squint his big blue eyes as he sewed together the gaps in Bucky’s clothes. His delicate artist’s fingers weaving together the smallest stitches. The lamplight flickered.  Bucky stared as the shadow cast from the flame licked like a tongue at Steve’s hands.

There’s metal beneath his back, he can hear that too, hear its tinny wobble as Bucky shakes involuntarily.  People are talking around him, but it’s hard to grasp what they’re saying. He’s fluent in German by now, has always had an ear for language, but it isn’t his mother tongue, so it’s hard to parse through the suffering.

 _“Keep him still!”_ and, _“He’s stronger than the others,”_ and _“Stop the bleeding,”_ and, “ _Wenn er stirbt, bin ich die Nächste.”_   

He should be dead.  Bucky died, didn’t he?  

He remembers it:  Steve straining toward him, the panic in his eyes. The sad click in the back of Bucky’s mind as he thought _If this is it, at least he’ll be the last thing I see_ \-- followed viciously by the things Bucky wish he had said in all the moments that came before this final one.

The sickening give of the bar underneath his hands.  

The lurch in his stomach as he plummeted to the ground.

He closed his eyes and accepted his fate.  Tried to conjure the image of the way Steve would smile at him like Bucky was the whole goddamn world, but his life didn’t even have to decency to flash before him.  He was going to take all that regret, everything left unsaid and undone, and die with it.

Then: Nothing.

Bucky wasn’t raised christian, doesn’t cop to the anglican concept of heaven and hell. Doesn’t believe in a transcendent, immanent God.  If he exists, then he’s a real piece of work because Bucky has seen some fucking _things_ that no merciful being would ever allow.  

But this might be hell.  He really thinks this might be hell:  The pain, and the regrets, and the frost in his bones.

So he screams.

 

\---

 

“It will be easier if you cooperate,” Zola says calmly.  He taps his pencil against the pages of his notebook. “You are still healing from your injuries, additional stress is… inadvisable at this stage.”

“All right then,” Bucky smiles and nods down to the metal bands holding him in place, “unstrap me from this chair and I _promise_ I’ll be on my best behavior.”  His eyes flick up to the strange black halo above him, fixed with clamps and already humming with electricity.  Whatever they’re planning on doing to him with it can’t be good, but it can’t be any worse than the pain he’s already endured.

Zola sighs. “You are a brave soldier Sergeant Barnes, but you do not have to be.  Hydra does not need your will. We need only your compliance, won’t that be so much easier?  Do you not grow weary of this routine?”

There’s something in the way he says it, that makes Bucky flinch with sudden déjà vu.  “What the hell are you talking about?” he asks, and blinks when the feeling sharpens in the back of his mind.

Zola nods at someone over Bucky’s shoulder and the halo begins lowering over him.

“Surely you know this is not the first time we’ve shared this conversation today.  Almost word for word. I count at least twelve times now. Your fidelity is astounding.”

“Conversation…? ” Bucky repeats dumbly.

“Memory suppression is not an exact science, I’m afraid.  But do not fear, my methods are improving. Now, think about your childhood.”

His mind automatically tries to dredge up images of family, the places he played as a child, but all he can see are empty tables and blurred images of unfamiliar landscapes.

“What have you done?” he asks, angry and confused, heart beating a horrible rhythm against his ribs. “What the hell have you done to me?”

The crackle of electricity descends over him, and Bucky’s eyes squeeze shut as he charges through his memories, and _Steve,_ god, thank _god,_ he’s still there.  Small and sick; godlike and invincible, the whole span of him impossibly bright in Bucky’s mind either way.   _Remember this,_ Bucky tells himself, _even if everything else is gone, remember this._

“We use so much of our brain storing worthless information,” Zola drones on, “imagine what you could be capable of without all of this baggage dictating every action.  See how we’ve already improved you?” he taps on Bucky’s metal hand and without knowing how he’s doing it, Bucky unfurls the fingers and strains to crush Zola’s own. The straps over his wrists groan, and the sound of it brings in a fleeting memory of having torn through the restraints once before.  Bucky squints at the unmistakable welding line where they’ve been repaired, and jerks his arms until he feels the metal stretching against his skin. He shouldn’t be able to do this

Zola clicks his tongue in disapproval.  “Be still now, Sergeant Barnes. Fighting will only make this worse.”

“You should have let me die, then,” Bucky says between clenched teeth and begins thrashing in earnest.  Zola’s eyes widen and he begins backing up and screaming orders in German.

One final heave and the shackles give.  Bucky leaps out of the chair and charges Zola.  Men with guns, men with sticks that look similar to cattle prods, they begin flooding through the door into the chamber, but Bucky’s too fast now, too strong.  His metal hand fists into the front of Zola’s shirt, and he throws him like a ragdoll six feet away. He might have gone further, but the wall breaks the course and Zola lands heavy and unconscious onto the cement floor.

One by one Bucky takes out the agents in the room, his fist smashing through bone, tearing cartilage.  Electricity volts through him when a few manage to get their probes against his chest, but he grits his teeth and endures it and moves with single-minded focus.

A tipped dart takes him out in the end, sails through the air and lands in the crook of his neck,  followed by two more in his back, near his spine. Bucky fights the wave of disorientation that overtakes him, but eventually he’s swaying on his feet, bodies piled up around him.  

The world tilts.

 

\---

 

He hears them whispering as his mind slowly orients itself.  They’ve gotten smarter in handling Bucky. His metabolism chews through the tranquilizers quick, but not quick enough to fight his way out of Zola’s chair, not quick enough to pull his concentration together to mentally prepare himself for the halo’s neural rerouting.

“...crashed into the Arctic, a body has not been recovered.  Not even _he_ could have survived that.”

"It is not what we had originally hoped, but with their Captain America gone, we might at least lick our wounds in peace and prepare for the future.”

“Hail Hydra.”

Bucky’s gut understands before his mind can, and it’s a slow sinking feeling, a black hole in the pit of his stomach where you hide all the truths you’d rather not know.  Like: One day, the world will end. And: Happiness, without fail, will eventually give way to conflict.

And: Everyone you love will die.

“Who?” Bucky blinks and tries to focus his eyes, “Who’s gone?”

A laugh.  Indecipherable chatter.  Someone draws near to Bucky.  They lean down and whisper in his ear. “Sergeant Barnes, I am afraid I must inform you that your dear friend Steven Rogers is nothing but flotsam and jetsam scattered about the bottom of the sea.  

“No,” Bucky says, “No. I don’t believe you. No. _No,_ ” teeth gritting, every striation of muscle tissue growing taut with incipient rage, grief detonates over and over like a dirty bomb.  He tries pulling against the restraints, but his body is still weakened and this time there is no give. “I swear to god, I’ll kill every last one of you.”

“It does not matter what you believe,” a button is pressed and Bucky hears electricity crackling over him.  “You will not remember this, in time. You won’t even know his name.”

 

\---

 

Bucky sheds memories.

The torture he can handle.  Pain can be grounding. But Zola’s memory suppressor is another matter entirely. At first he isn’t even aware of it.  How can you miss what you can’t remember? He lies on the cot at night after they’re finished with him in the lab, and all he feels is the niggling sensation in the back of his mind where something used to be. There’s a growing hollowness within him that defies understanding.  

Bit by bit Bucky disappears.

He forgets his mother’s name, her face.  

He forgets where he grew up.  He forgets Hanukkah at his saba and savta’s apartment on the east side.  

He forgets Wallabout Bay in spring, the gentle lap of water against the bulkhead.  His feet dangling over the edge of the ship during a break, and eating the plum Steve slipped into his bag that morning.  The gulls crying out overhead.

He forgets the sound of a jazz record echoing out of an open window, slow dancing with girls at the pub.

He forgets his favorite food, his favorite color.  He forgets the old Irish lullabies Sarah Rogers sang while she cooked colcannon over the stove.  How when the tuberculosis reached its end stages, Bucky had to pull Steve away from her and tended to her himself because he couldn’t risk Steve getting infected by the blood she coughed up into her open hands.  There was no way his body could fight off a disease like that, just a _croup_ could lay Stevie out for weeks.  

Then he forgets Sarah Rogers all together.  All her fussing at them in _gaeilge_ when Steve and Bucky drug in mud from the streets on the bottoms of their shoes.  All the worrying she did over her baby boy, all the endless nights working shifts at the hospital to cover Steve’s medicine.  

Then, one day Bucky wakes up and can not recall how he got here in this room, only that this is where he lives now.  

When he questions it, or becomes violent, they punish him.  They drag in strangers and put a gun in Bucky’s hand and command him to shoot, and he does, because whatever they’ve done to him, it’s made it to where Bucky can’t say _no_ anymore.  He looks in their empty eyes and feels himself pulling apart at the seams.

He points the gun at his own head.  It will be better this way, no one else will die by his hand.  His finger tightens on the trigger.

“ _Soldat,_ drop that weapon.”  And he does. “Sit.” He does.   

They put him back under the halo and it feels like being ripped apart _._ It’s a painful process, forgetting.  But remembering hurts too, it just does it in a place where Bucky can not see or touch.  

He sleeps in ice.

When he wakes up, he remembers even less.  He’s naked and shaking on a table while techs run diagnostics on his arm.  They murmur words to him that take away all the confusion, all the anxiety and heartache and fear, and sometimes he’s just so _thankful_ for it-- not having to feel.   

But sometimes when they begin this series of repeated words, Bucky panics.  He does not know what it is whispering in the back of his head, telling him to catch one of these technicians by the neck.  His hand shoots out and clasps around a throat. The man squeaks and claws at Bucky’s arm while the others scatter about, calling for help.  

“Stop,” he warns, when the man keeps trying to gasp out the word _benign._

Some part of him wants to run, _knows_ he should run.  Something isn’t right here, Bucky knows it in the pit of his stomach.  Something will happen if they finish reading that page in the red book.  He won’t be _Bucky_ anymore, he doesn’t know when that happened, when his _self_ became a thing buried under words.

“Release him, _Soldat,_ ” another voice says, and it’s several long moments before Bucky complies.  

They transfer him to another facility.  Bucky is trained constantly. He’s put into rooms with over a dozen men armed with guns and knives, and he fights his way through the wall of them.  They train him to be soundless, how to hide and disappear without a trace, and more, so much _more._

“We are helping you, soldier.  Through you, our world will finally know freedom.”  For all he knows, it’s true.

He knows to lie when they ask questions about what Bucky remembers from his life before.  He tells them the truth, there was no life before Hydra and their mission.

These memories of Steve Rogers are displaced from time, they are dreams replayed against the backs of Bucky’s eyelids when he sleeps; little sparks of joy, bittersweet and aching amidst all of the Bucky’s nothingness.  

Steve sitting on a rock, sketching a dogwood tree, the sun threading itself through his hair and lighting it up in shades of bisque.

Steve’s cackling laugh, the smile that would reach his eyes.  How his Brooklyn accent would take on a bit of his mother’s Galway lilt after one gin rickey.

A dozen nights spent sharing food, taking walks, conversations Bucky can no longer recall aside from the calming melody of Steve’s voice.  The conviction with which he speaks, clever as a whip, but too smart and too brave for his own good.

The clarity has been taken from much of these memories, but one remains burned and inextricable in Bucky’s head:

 

Side by side with Steve, staring down at a woman in a casket and Steve doesn’t cry.  Bucky knows better though, can read his face just as easily if he’d spoken all that hurt aloud. He wants to reach out and touch him, wrap him safe in his arms, but all Bucky manages is a hand closing over a frail shoulder.

“I won’t make you sit around and watch me die like that. It ain’t right.”

“C’mon, you’re gonna outlive us all.  You’re too stubborn to roll over.”

“You know I’ll be lucky to make it to twenty-five, Buck.”  

He sounds resigned to it, believes it so much.  And that’s the crux with Steve, always, he sees every moment as borrowed time.  He’s had doctors telling him since birth that he wouldn’t make it another year. A mountain of a man in a frail body, and instead of the constant pain and illness making him bitter, he let it turn him kind.  He only wants to make a difference before his body fails. Steve wants to dig into the world with all ten fingers like claws and pry away some of the rottenness.

It’s a truth Bucky can’t bear to admit to himself.  Even on the nights spent awake, watching the stuttered rise and fall of Steve’s chest as he struggles to breathe, Bucky can still not accept the eventuality of living in a world where Steve doesn’t exist.  How is he meant to go on, if that happened?

“Shut up, what happened to your Ma isn’t happening to you.  Promised her I’d keep you alive, and I’m damn sure not going back on that.”

His eyes, fond and sad. _“_ You can’t promise something like that. No one can.”

Steve shuddering in his bed that night when he thinks Bucky has fallen asleep, there’s rasp in his chest when he breathes.  It’s not the pneumatic rattle of illness, or the wheeze of asthma. It sounds far less familiar. Bucky’s watched Steve take some pretty awful beatings, seen him lie sick as a dog, so sick he can’t talk or move hardly, he’s overhead the cruel things schoolyard bullies say about a guy like Steve, and never once has he seen Steve shed a tear over any of it.  Sometimes his eyes go all red limned and watery if he gets angry enough, but if he ever cried for sadness sake, he did it where Bucky couldn’t see.

But he’s human, the grief of the day has finally caught up to him, and when Bucky peels back the blanket and gets in beside him, Steve goes still, completely still.  He exhales slowly.

He must have known, must have figured it out the second Bucky slipped up against the backs of Steve’s cold thighs, that this wasn’t the same as all the times they’d huddled together for warmth.  That first time, Bucky had woken up the next morning aching and hard between the legs, one hand possessively clasped over Stevie’s bony hip, Bucky’s lips tipped low against the nape of his neck. Bucky had slowly propped himself up on an elbow and just _looked_ at him, some sort of realization shaping itself in his chest and moving upward.  Steve’s hair was spun gold in the sunrise, those soft doe eyes closed to the light of day.  No furrow between his brow and hard set to his mouth like he had the weight of the word bearing down on him.  He was at peace, gentled by Bucky’s hands on him, and Bucky felt drunk off the sight of it. Steve made a soft noise and snuffled down against the pillow and Bucky shot off the bed like a bullet, had to go splash cold water on his face.  

Bucky was real careful with his hands after that, and Bucky _knew_ then what kind of man he was.  He just didn’t know how it’d grow over time-- how much he would want Steve in all the ways you can want another person, or how the yearning for him would never ever ever ever let up, not even for a minute.  He could barely breathe for all the loving, and the wanting, and the hurting he did over Steve. Made him feel so guilty, like he was doing something wrong, yearning for more than what was offered.

Bucky wasn’t allowed to look at the graceful arch of Steve’s hand while he played with motes of dust, and imagine those hands on him.  He knew what happened to boys in this town who touched other boys, and that wasn’t going to be them. He’d die before he’d put Steve in danger.  

But Bucky breaks now, can’t help it.  Never gets as hot over any dame as he does over Steve.  Bucky can’t ever just leave him be.

Bucky wipes the tears off Steve’s cheeks even though he flinches at first.  Gentle hearted as Steve is, he’s never taken tenderness well from another hand-- can never tell if he’s being patronized or not.  Bucky’s fingers hover there for a second, hesitating, but he does it again anyway. This time, when Bucky’s thumb brushes over tear tracks, Steve--ever so slightly--leans into it.  Bucky touches the pads of his fore and middle finger under his chin and turns Steve’s face until they are looking at each other and Bucky _wants_ , in this moment.  Wants to make Steve understand this _thing_ that wells up like daylight inside him, just to be in the same room with Steve.  He doesn’t have words for it, but he wants to share it anyways.

It felt too big to hold in the cage of his chest, in that moment.

Bucky’s hand opens around the curve of his throat, Steve’s pulse throbs against his thumb, the look in his eyes guarded and hungry all at once.  It’s nothing to lean down into him, their noses brushing together, and even that, such a simple touch, makes Bucky feel like someone took a match to his bare skin.

“What are you doing,” Steve whispers, cold hand flattening against Bucky’s bare chest.

“Can’t stand it when you’re blue Stevie.  You know I can’t.”

“Don’t need your pity,” Steve says, his breath warm against Bucky’s lips, and he sounds so damn defiant, but his eyes-- always his eyes telling the truth on him.

“Ain’t pity,” Bucky murmurs, head angling to brush down the other side of Steve’s nose.

Stevie’s eyes close, like he can’t afford to look at Bucky up close anymore.  He trembles. “You don’t gotta-- not for me.”

Before he realizes it’s coming out of his mouth Bucky says, “Not just _you_ I’m doing it for, it’s my life too,” and hates how terrible it sounds, how selfish. Hates how it’s the the truth, and the truth makes him nervous, makes him desperate, and it shows because then Bucky is throwing in the cards and whispering right up against Steve’s parted lips, “Let me, let me, just this once, _pl--”_

He never gets out that wretched _please,_ because Steve groans and presses up to meet Bucky’s still moving mouth, and that shuts Bucky right the hell up.  

Kissing Steve isn’t kissing at all, it’s like being enveloped by the sun-- something bursts open inside of Bucky, and he’ll never be the same afterward.  

We wasn’t, and he isn’t.  

He’d seen lightning strike the hull of a boat once, watched how the man banging away on it arched and went to shaking, and that’s how Bucky feels when the soft tip of Steve’s tongue finds its way into his mouth:  Shocked all the way through. He makes some sort of god awful whining noise and scrambles to get on top of Steve, painfully aware that he needs to be careful, but wanting so badly to push out those tremors that keep running up and down Steve’s body.

It happens so fast, in the memory, from kissing like that, their hands in each other’s hair-- to panting into each other’s mouths, their hands scrambling to push down their cotton drawers. When Bucky gets his dick out, he curses and works himself up against the cradle of Steve’s bare hips, just rubbing up against him like an animal, slick and leaking.

No performance, no trying to impress, Bucky feels like he’ll die if he doesn’t get close enough.

Steve’s head thuds back against the pillow. His bottom lip drags between his teeth. Bucky spits in his palm and closes his hand around their cocks and jerks them fast, no finesse at all, nearly comes at the sound of that choked, “ _Bucky,”_ dropping from between Steve’s lips.

And Bucky mutters, “Yeah, that’s right,” head full of nonsense.

Bucky ought to be embarrassed that all it takes is a little necking and Steve’s fingers creeping low down the carve of Bucky’s spine, to send him around the bend.  It wasn’t just the pleasure of it spurring them together that night, though there was that too. It was something past getting off, something scalding to the touch and bone deep, _needy,_ and so so so immense.  

Bucky wanted to press his body into Steve’s and stay there like a shield, keep him safe always.  And Steve… god knows what it was that drove him that night, the great black heft of grief, or that same indefinable need, all of it or none of it bringing them together.

Bucky buries his face in Steve’s neck when he comes, cock sliding along the inside of Steve’s thigh, choking on air and half chewed vowels of Steve’s name spilling messily out of his mouth.

He thinks those sounds are what might have done it for Steve.  Maybe that’s hubris. But as soon as Bucky starts gasping right up close in his ear, Steve’s fingers convulse over the swell of Bucky’s ass, nails digging into skin, and Bucky rears back up just in time to see Steve’s face seize up in pleasure.  

Steve is quiet about it, nothing more than a whimper when Bucky feels the first hot pulse of him against his belly.  Beautiful. He’s the most beautiful thing Bucky’s ever seen, and he tells him so. Whispers it low and dirty against Steve’s panting mouth, is hungry already for more of those little sounds, doesn’t want Steve to hold them back next time.  Bucky’s thumbs smear over his high cheekbones, into his hair, he holds Steve there and licks into his open mouth.

They don’t talk afterward. Bucky cleans them up with his shirt and makes Steve turn to face him on his side, and keeps kissing him until sleep creeps over them both.

They should have talked about it.  

Hindsight is bitch that way, because by daybreak neither of them knew what to say in the glaring spotlight of morning.

When Bucky gets out of bed and finds Steve going through old photos he says, “Stevie…” all loaded and nervous like, and Steve looks up and waits for him to say something, eyes terrified, and all Bucky can shove out his stupid mouth is, “Thought about stewing some apples for breakfast, sound good to you?”

That look of terror closes off immediately, and for the first time in his life, Bucky has no idea what Steve’s eyes are saying.  “Sure,” Steve murmurs, “sounds real good, Buck.”

 

He knows this memory is real, and not a dream, because in a dream you can exert influence, work your will.  In a dream, Bucky closes the distance between them and begs Steve to love him, kisses his smart ass mouth and tells him he meant it, all of it, Bucky’s hands on him and the choice he’d made the moment their lips touched.

Bucky thought he would have _time_ for those words, then time stopped, and new words were forced on him.

Sometimes he wakes, and remembers that Steve Rogers is dead.  Over and over, the grief starts again from the beginning.

Bucky remembers Steve was the heart of his world, and when they took away Steve, Bucky’s world stopped too. Bucky dies much like Steve must have:  Cold and alone.

 

\---

 

He has no name.

 _Soldat. Asset._ He answers to these, now.

But the Asset holds fast to Steve Rogers, even after he has forgotten the sound of his own name.

These recollections are the last to fade.  First he can not remember Steve’s voice, his mouth shapes soundless words.  The Asset loses Steve’s face, in pieces. He cannot recall the exact color of his eyes or hair, or the curve of his lips.  Negative space closes in around him. It feels like death. Only on good days can the Asset remember Steve’s name. But it is just a name, a word that makes no sense but feels heavy and significant on his tongue nevertheless.

Every memory, every inch of life, runs out like sand between his fingers.

 

\---

 

“Kill him.”  A gun is slid into the Asset’s hand.

The Asset stares across the room at the young man tied onto a wooden chair.  No more than 21, from the look of him. His eyes are clenched shut, he’s whispering a prayer to himself in Polish.  He’s frail, blonde hair a neglected, matted mess that spills over his forehead.

Something blunt cracks hard against the Asset’s cheek.  The taste of blood is sharp and metallic on his tongue. He raises his weapon and aims it at the man’s head-- and waits, waits, waits.

 _“Proszę',”_ the man says, voice hoarse from crying, “ _nie rób tego.”  Please, do not do this._ He never looks up from the floor, just sits there crying and praying and begging.

“Who is he,” the Asset asks, panic rising in his throat, “what has he done?”

“Who he is,” the handler bites out, “doesn’t fucking _matter._ You were given an order _Soldat.”_

His finger trembles on the trigger. The gun drops from his hand, falls heavily to the floor.

They’re on him in a second.  Needles burn into his skin. He throws them off, but soon his vision is swimming, his body becomes uncoordinated.

A muzzle is slid over his face, and he _screams_ into it.  They lock him in a room, and close the door.   It’s small, dark like a coffin, there’s no sound coming or going, just the whisper of the Asset’s respiration.  The metal walls press in against him on every side. He feels like he’s suffocating. First it’s freezing cold. Then it’s so hot the Asset thinks he might be being burned alive.  Then it’s freezing again. It’s always one or the other.

He can’t move his arms or legs.  Shoulders hunched and neck cricked to one side, he stands.

He doesn’t know how long he stays in there.  Long enough to feel hunger wasting away within him, long enough to grow weak, long enough to forget why he’s there, long enough to start hearing voices.  When his body finally gives way to exhaustion, the Asset leans back into the wall. Each time he tries to sleep, an electric shock is triggered through the metal and sears through his body.  It shorts out the pressure receptors in his arm, and the malfunction translates as _pain pain pain_ in a constant feedback loop _._

By the time someone comes for him, he’s so grateful to be let out of the room, that the sitting under the halo is almost welcome.  The agony is indescribable, but afterward they murmur words that take away the confusion. They give him warm food, and allow him bathe.  They repair the fried wires in his arm, take away the constant hurt, and say, “Isn’t that better?”

They stand him in front of the young man, he’s still tied down to the wooden chair, but this time he does not pray.  He does not speak at all. He simply gazes back the the Asset, his blue eyes glazed over and empty of fear, resigned to his fate.  This man is already dead, in a way, the Asset thinks. Broken.

“Kill him,” the handler instructs.

The Asset raises the gun and pulls the trigger.

 

\---

 

He freezes, he wakes up. He’s given a mission.

Over and over. The same thing. Over and over and over and over and over and--

He sustains injuries when a mass of armed security tries to keep the Asset from his target.  Seventh and eighth ribs broken. Gunshot wound left shoulder. _Leave no witnesses._ He moves forward.  He does not think. The pain is secondary to the mission.  The target’s trachea crushes under his hand.

 

He freezes, he wakes up. He’s given a mission.

Ten people gathered in a house. He hunts them down and dispatches them one at a time. A few of them scream, but none of them are fast enough to escape.  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Always keep moving, don’t stop until you have finished, _Soldat._

 

He freezes. He wakes up. They give him a mission

There’s a knife in his hand.  There’s someone else’s blood soaking into his clothes, and he can’t remember why it makes him feel sick.  He watches the light leave a person’s eyes, sees death the moment it happens.

“When does it stop,” the Asset asks his handler, and the man fixes him with a narrowed gaze, before dialing the unlock code on the cryo tank.  “When is the mission over?” he looks at the blood staining his nail beds and begins to shake. “Whose blood is th--”

 

He freezes, he wakes up.  He’s given a mission.

“It must look like an accident _Soldat,_ ” his handler instructs.

He follows a man and woman in a car down a dark road, makes them crash headfirst into a tree.  The man pulls himself out of the vehicle, all bloodied fingers, and the earth underneath his knees, the Asset pulls him up by the hair--and for a moment, something sparks in the back of his mind.  

The Asset hesitates.

“Sergeant Barnes?” The mark blinks up at him in a daze.

He does not feel things like anxiety, or panic, but something gnaws in the pit of his stomach when he hears those words-- when he sees this face.  The mark just looks.. surprised.. as the Asset neutralizes him, like he did not expect to die by this hand, in particular. The woman is crying, calling _Howard, Howard,_ and the Asset closes his hand around her throat until the crying stops.

The feeling in his stomach grows fingers, stretches upward into the Asset’s chest, in his throat.  He abandons his transport far away from the scene of the mission, and immediately falls to his knees and vomits on the ground.  He can’t be sick, physically can not, but the bile soaking into ground says differently. His mind blanks out, abandons his body.  They’ve instructed him to do this as soon as there is any implication of being compromised. He does not know how long it is before his handlers come to collect him, only that they swarm him in a small apartment building far from where he last remembers.

One of the men speak into a radio, eyes never leaving the Asset.  There are ten others, all armed and pointing their weapons at him.  “Asset located. 166 Montague Street. He’s in Brooklyn, sir.”

_“Bring him in immediately, any means necessary. Do not allow the asset to enter the premises!”_

“Copy.”  The handler approaches slowly. “Mission report.”

The Asset stares at a point on the faraway wall where water leaks from a vent, drips _patpatpat_ onto the floor.  

There’s a sharp sting across his cheek from where his handler strikes him with the butt of the M-16, and the Asset’s head jerks to one side.  “ _Soldat!_ Mission report.”

The details of the mission weave in and out of his mind in indistinct blurs, he focuses on the mark’s face, his mouth shaping those two words.  Why did the Asset hesitate? Was it because of those words? The way the mark had looked at the Asset’s face as if he recognized it?

“Who is Sergeant Barnes?” The Asset asks quietly.  “Was that.. Am I him?”

The handler’s eyes widen, obviously startled, but does not answer.  “I said, Mission Report.”

“I killed them,” the Asset says, his eyes are beginning to sting, “Why would I do that?” and he does not know why his voice cracks, but that is the exact moment the floodgates open, inundating him with images and thoughts and words that feel too intimate to be completely unfamiliar and, “ _Steve,”_ the Asset gasps, “Where’s Steve?” How could he have forgotten Steve Rogers?  He would have forgotten how to breathe, first. This doesn’t look like his home, not completely, but the way the moon dips low in the window seems heartbreakingly familiar.

 _“Derr`mo,_ ” the handler curses and gestures to men behind the Asset’s shoulders.  “I’ll calm it down, we’ll do a wipe when we get it back to base. Hold him.”  The others rush to him, three to each arm, the rest grasping his shoulders and legs as they pin him to the ground.  One of them sets off the EMP to neutralize his arm, there’s a blinding flash of pain before it goes dead and heavy at his side.  He doesn’t understand why they’re doing this, he isn’t trying to hurt anyone, he isn’t--

His handler removes the red book from where it’s tucked into the band of his trousers and says in carefully enunciated Russian, _“Longing.”_

The word lands like a bullet to the chest.  

“W--wait, wait,” the Asset struggles, “ _please_ \--”

_“Rusted. Seventeen. Daybreak. Furnace.”_

“STOP!”  His eyes clench shut, body shaking, he tries slamming his palms down over his ears to block out the words, but as soon as he throws one of his captors off, another one is there slamming his hand to the ground.  He screams instead, but it’s still not enough to drown out those words. These words are poison.

_“Nine. Benign. Homecoming. One.”_

“Just let me go home,” the Asset whispers.

_“Freight car.”_

 

He’s falls, and falls and falls.  He’s always falling. The emptiness rises up to meet him, stretches out in front of him.  Becomes endless.

 

\---

 

The maid lies slumped against the door, Pierce does not make any effort to remove the body.  The Asset looks at the blood splatter against the glass. It is not his concern, though it seems needlessly messy to leave her out in the open this way.  Pierce does not appear perturbed, and he does not order the Asset to assist in a disposal, so he remains still in the chair for further instructions.

Pierce sets the gun on the table and folds his hands over it, his finger rests over the curve of the trigger.  A warning. A reminder that the Asset is just as disposable as the woman whose body lies cooling against glass, vulnerable and exposed.

“I’ve read your file, you know,” Pierce says.  “Very impressive.” The Asset sits. He does not respond. He is silent unless asked to speak.  “Your IQ tests,” he laughs, “well, let’s just say learning doesn’t come as naturally to everyone. I wonder what you might have been if you’d been born into the right caste, during the time in which you lived.”

It is a strange thing to say, but the Asset is conditioned to listen and disregard everything unrelated to the mission.  

“Terrible thing, poverty.  It robs people of opportunity.  That’s why I’m so grateful we found you.  You’re one of Hydra’s greatest successes. Here,” he slides a file across the table, keeps his hand on top of it as he narrows his eyes.  “I was told that you might never be ready for this mission. But I disagree, I believe it’s been long enough, overdue even. Open it.”

The Asset opens the file and studies the pictures provided.  As always there is no additional information, there is none needed, you do not need to know a person’s history in order to kill them.  You don’t even need to know their name.

He recalls the red-haired woman, they had allowed him to keep that memory of failure, and all the torture associated thereafter.  He should have made sure she had been neutralized alongside his mark. The blonde man is a stranger, though. In one candid picture he’s depicted in civilian dress, and in the other picture he’s wearing a uniform of sorts, painted in enemy colors.  If he’s a level 6 mark, then it means he’s highly dangerous as well. Capable of broad destruction and resistant to damage, same as the Asset.

His eyes are sad.

 _Why the long face pal,_ something whispers, _you’re always lookin’ like you got weight of the world on your shoulders.  C’mon, let’s split a sundae, my treat._

“Look closely.  Do you know this man?”

The Asset’s heart glitches, briefly, in his chest. “No.”

“Good.  Very good.  Ten hours, you won’t fail me, will you.”

It isn’t a question.  Like everything else, it is an order.  

“No.”

 

\---

 

It all goes wrong.

It all goes so completely, so spectacularly wrong.

“I’m not going to fight you.  You’re my _friend._ ”

The Asset is compromised.  He doesn’t know what’s happening to him.

And he’s _angry._ It’s a terrible, dark thing that seizes over him in a crushing vice, and the Asset forgot what it was to carry anger.  To be afraid. To feel, full stop, and now it’s happening all at once-- crumbling from the inside out.

His mind tells him things that he has no point of reference for, words bubble up in his throat that don’t make sense.  He wants to scream at Steve because this is _his fault._ Why did he have throw down his arms and invoke that name?  Why did he have to save the Asset’s life? Why did Steve have to go and leave Bucky all _alone?_

He wants to crush Steve Rogers under his hands.  He wants to shield Steve Rogers with his body so nothing else can touch him. The two desires run hopelessly incongruent with each other.

Even as the helicarrier burns and shakes apart around them, and Steve Rogers falls down into the murky water below , the Asset-- _Bucky--_ whoever the _hell_ he is, doesn’t know that he’s going to dive in after him until he’s in the river.  He doesn’t even know he can still _make_ decisions outside the parameters of a mission anymore.  The only thing he knows for sure, is that Rogers will die if left alone, he’ll drown on the muddy bottom of that river, and the knowledge of it weighs like heavy stones in the Asset’s belly.

He lets go of the helicarrier, and plunges down into the water.  Debris is still falling from above. Blonde hair glints in the water as Steve sinks and the Asset’s fingers strain toward him, grasping into the material stretching across his chest.  They surface and the Asset inhales, the air still tastes acrid from burned fuel.

Rogers doesn’t breathe at all.  

The Asset treads water, his metal arm is wrapped across Roger’s chest, and he compresses the best he can in this position.   _I did this,_ he thinks _,_ and the self-loathing at the admission is ferocious, immediate. He’s babbling without even realizing, clipped words murmured straight into Rogers ear, his mouth on autopilot.

“Just breathe, damn it.  You mean to tell me you can take three bullets, but a little water does you in?   _Breathe.”_

Steve geysers water from his mouth, gasps on a breath of air, as if he was waiting for the Asset to ask it of him.  Even though he’s more tired than he’s ever been, and his mind feels like it’s collapsing in his skull, all the Asset can feel in that moment is _relief._

The Asset swims them to land and deposits his mark there on the muddy bank.  He stalls and glances down at the mess he’s made of Rogers face, he’s already beginning to heal the least of the cuts and bruises.  He won’t die here. Roger’s handlers, his team, they are not like Hydra. They do not see Steve Rogers as something perhaps useful, but ultimately expendable.

The Asset needs to leave, needs as much distance from this scene as possible.  There are sirens in the distance, drones circling the wreckage, people will find them soon.  The Asset can’t go back to the ice. The thought of it makes his throat raw with panic. He doesn’t remember who he is anymore, or why it seems like the most important thing in the world to keep the man on the ground safe and breathing.

He only knows he can’t stay.  It would only bring more danger if he stays.

 

\---

  


The Asset sees the moment Steve Rogers realizes he’s not alone in the hospital room.  He doesn’t make sound when he moves, not anymore, there’s not even the muted hush of a body sliding through an open window.  It’s as if something beyond plain sensory-- some piece of Steve Rogers beyond self-awareness is particularly calibrated to this presence.

He doesn’t approach Steve, he keeps far away, watching.

Steve stirs in bed, keeps his eyes closed.  “I know you’re here,” he says into the silence, then sits up slowly.  Bucky’s back is turned in a second, he’s already pushing the window open to climb through, and Steve voice has a panicked note to it when he calls out to him.  

“Wait!  Don’t go, I’m not gonna call anyone on--” he tries getting out of bed but the fractures in his ribs must be grating. His mouth pulls into a wince. Takes at least a day or two for broken bones to knit, even in a damage resistant body.  Hurts worse sometimes, the body stitching itself whole faster than it was meant to.

Steve turns to let down the bedrail, that deep grimace still on his face, he holds his side.  Holds himself together.

“Stop,” the Asset says softly, and Steve glances up. The Asset’s gaze flicks to the worst of Steve’s injuries, back to the bed, pointedly back to Steve. 

_Tell me it was Peter Kowalski again, say it.  Tell me it was him so I can go break his nose._ **_Bucky, just leave it be._ ** _I will not.  Can’t idle when you got two black eyes and blood on your lip._ **_Don’t need you fightin’ my battles for me._ ** _If it’s your battle, then it’s mine too.  When are you gonna understand that I--_

“Alright,” Steve says, holds his hands out in front of him like he’s talking to a wounded animal, moves slowly back onto the bed.  “You win.”

The Asset blinks, shakes his head a bit, clears out the voices in it, and when he looks back at Steve, Steve is studying him with those expressive eyes.  

“How’s the arm?” Steve asks after a moment, nods toward where the Asset is holding his flesh arm close to his side.  Just a hairline fracture, not a complete break. That sickening _snap_ of bone sounded a lot worse than what it actually was.  Rogers was definitely holding back, and he knows it, so the Asset doesn’t answer.

Steve sighs, shrugs.  “Not that I’m not happy to see you, but it probably wasn’t a great idea to climb Walter-Reed one handed.  When I broke my wrist you wouldn’t even let me write my _name,_ much less Tarzan myself up the side of a hospital.”

The Asset’s eyes dart away, but unlike a moment ago, no recollection of this event is whispered across his memory.  He looks back up at Steve. They stare at each other, openly appraising. Steve, apparently, can only take so much of that. The Asset can see how badly he wants to speak, can practically see the words taking up room inside his throat, like he might choke if he can’t release them.

“I thought you were dead,” Steve murmurs.

“Thought you were too,” The Asset says back, then blinks, brow furrowing.

The hope brightening Steve’s face is close to unbearable.  “Do you remember?”

“No.”

“Then what makes you say that?” Steve urges, but the Asset edges closer to his escape.

“I don’t know.”

Again, the silence.

“I think about it every night, Bucky,”  Steve tells him, “what I could have done better. How I could have been faster.  Dreamed about it when I was under the ice-- our hands outstretched, the look in your eye right before that handle gave way.  I never reach you in time, even in a _dream_ I don’t save you.  Should never have stopped looking for your body.  They got you, soon as I looked away, they got you and they hurt you.  I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not--” the desire to say _not your fault_ is immediate, emphatic.  Bursts out from behind the Asset’s teeth before he even know the words have formed.

“Yes it is,” Steve cuts in, “it is, Buck.” He lies back down in bed, stares up at the ceiling.  A muscle in his jaw flickers. “I thought I was in hell, losing you over and over in my head like that, but now I know better. I know _this_ is it.  Hell is that look in your eye, and my failure come back to haunt me.  It’s getting you back, only to lose you again.”

“I _said_ I don’t remember,” the Asset says, more forcefully, because he understands how it feels, and _he’s_ frustrated too.  They’re both just so desperate to be recognized.  It isn’t fair.

The monitors chime softly.  A cart is rolled by the door. Every second the Asset stays, the closer he is to capture.

“Look, whatever it is, whatever they made you do, I can help . I know people, _good people_ who won’t--”

The Asset doesn’t know what it is working it’s way up his throat, but it emerges as a choked laugh.  Rueful and bitter, and Steve stops speaking at the sound of it.

“No one can help me,” he grits out and reaches for the window.

“Bucky.. You don’t gotta run.”

“You don’t gotta follow.”

 _Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes always stick together. It’s a law of the universe, the same as gravity and chaos_ .   **_Which one of us is gravity, and which one of us is supposed to be chaos?_ **

“I do,” Steve says, helpless about it.  “You know I do.”

 

\--

 

He feels the tracker going off by the time he reaches the Maryland-Delaware state border. Doesn’t really feel it in the flesh and bone part of his body, it’s his other arm which picks up the hum of transmission.  The encased components are sophisticated, and the Asset has vague memories of upgrades, though he wasn’t always sure what they consisted of. He sort of just _knows_ the limitations automatically. No one informed him as to what sort of neural grafting he underwent to be able to control the arm with such precision, but whatever it was definitely left the Asset with a distinctly non-human ability to pick up certain types of frequencies.  Only within a relative proximity. Of course, it’s happening inside of himself, so the distance is immediate.

The Asset ditches a stolen motorcycle at a pier close to Chesapeake Bay, heads for the gas station several yards away, and closes himself off in its bathroom. He pulls off the hoodie and shirt he’d lifted right out of a laundromat on his way out of D.C., folds them and sets them on lid of the toilet. The travel bag he’d pulled together is almost empty of supplies, the Asset’s fingers skip over the last bottled water and protein bar, and pulls out a small knife, twirls it until he’s palming the hilt. He lowers it to his shoulder and pauses, looks up to mirror.

The Asset studies the face staring back at him and tries to reconcile it to the face he’d seen in the Smithsonian exhibit, only 24 hours ago.  Some part of him had hoped Steve Rogers was wrong, it’d be much simpler that way, for everyone, to be nameless. To have no history besides the one forced on him.  But that _was_ his face, that _was_ his smile, and everything is almost exactly the same-- aside from the way it’s all completely different.  The face staring back him seems haunted, it doesn’t smile, the quicksilver of life is gone out of his eyes.

It is such an odd thing to see yourself become a stranger.

He _is_ Bucky Barnes, and he isn’t.  He calls himself by the name in his head, and it’s exhilarating, but also comes with a terrible heaviness. It forces him to think of himself as a person, instead of an object  An Asset. A Soldier. Hydra’s fist. The integration of the two is unimaginable.

He’s desperate to have a name again, but god, it’s so hard to _become_.  

 _Stop it,_ the Asset-- _Bucky_ \-- thinks.   _Focus._

There isn’t time to hesitate, he locates the spot below his collarbone and pushes down.

Blood wells up and spills down his chest, dark red and warm, stinking of iron in a way that threatens an influx of recollections of blood that isn’t his own staining his hands.  He can’t think about that right now. It’s all for nothing if he can’t get this damn tracker out. The knife going in is a familiar pain, the kind he can dissociate from for the most part in order to keep moving forward.   _Bucky_ lets the knife fall into the sink when the incision is deep enough, blood speckles against white porcelain.  Digging out the device is more difficult, he should have thought to grab a tool with a little more precision, other than his own fingers.  

His mouth trembles involuntarily as he locates the implant and begins to pull.  It yields easily enough and Bucky holds it in the palm of his right hand. The thing is no bigger than a quarter, tinsel wire dangling from it like jellyfish tentacles.

Bucky crushes it in his fist, watches as the light falters and goes dark.  

 

\---

 

When the Asset disappeared, his first inclination was to find all the bases he had been moved between, and burn them to the ground.  He’d find every last person who knew the Winter Soldier’s activation protocol, and make it to where they could never speak those words again.  Cut out their tongues if he had to, kill them the way they killed Bucky Barnes, piece by piece, leaving behind something empty and unrecognizable.  Hydra might have been dealt a lethal hit with the colossal disaster at the Triskelion, but they’re by no means dead. They’ll regroup. They always do. And they’ll come to collect him.

After that?  Well. He figured he’d probably be killed in the process.  Turning himself in isn’t wise either, too many Hydra operatives left out there still posing as every day people who could work their way into whatever high security prison he ended up in.  Take him back. Do it all over again.

Death would be kinder.

He isn’t sure he could watch another life pass under his hands at this point

He tries not to think about Steve.  It hurts less to not think of him as an option. Bucky will always be a danger to him, and even if he weren’t, he wouldn’t deserve Steve’s welcome.  Not after all the suffering Bucky has inflicted on the world. He’s done his research on Captain America’s team too, and not only has Bucky nearly killed Romanov twice, he’s murdered Tony Stark’s family in cold blood.  They didn’t take his memories of the missions because that would have been counterproductive. Every mission was a lesson in strategy and improvement, and while his recollection of Howard and Maria Stark’s deaths is oddly unfocused in comparison to others, there’s no mistaking what he took from that man.  He would have just been a _kid,_ and had his whole life ripped right out from under him.  

It’s a small fucking world, billions of people, and still Bucky managed to send violent ripples into the one sphere of individuals that would eventually adopt Steve.   

He runs, and he can’t stop running.

It’s difficult at the beginning.  Aside from the halo and plain torture, Hydra was also liberal with medicating their asset. Bucky knows he must be coming down from the cocktail of substances used to keep him compliant, repress anything that might prove distracting: Libido, pain, plain emotion-- they had something for all of it.

The detox is quick, but brutal.  It lasts 4 days where Bucky holes up in an abandoned bait shed on the coast of Halifax to ride it out.  His body shakes and his teeth chatter so hard he thinks they might splinter, fever hot and sweating, freezing cold and aching all over.  Can’t think straight, he’s delirious at one point-- having conversations with ghosts. His mind constantly drifting back to Steve Rogers, wishing for him even though he barely has any context for it besides wildly disjointed impressions, and information from a museum exhibit.  It’s a sort of an inborn pull, as sure as night and day, a thing borne in his heart and bones and viscera.

 **_You gotta take better care of yourself, Buck.  It ain’t right, working you to the bone in the middle of a blizzard.  You’ll catch your death._ ** _Look at you, stealin’ my best lines._ **_Your lips are turning blue, your hands feel like ice, and you haven’t stopped shaking since you walked through the door.  Trust me, I know what being sick looks like._ ** _Do you know how they fix cold exposure out in the wild, when they got no furnaces or warm water or hospitals?_ **_Get over here by the fire, jerk._ ** _They take off all their clothes._ **_Buck--_ ** _Not a stitch, full starkers, and they lie down together. Keep each other warm by the blood under their skin, bring em’ up to temp real slow because if you don’t, your heart can give out.  Just like that, Stevie._ **_I-- Bucky what are you suggest--_ **

Bucky moves as soon as he can stand again, but his body is weak from all the wallowing its done, expelling energy and taking none in to feed his overcharged metabolism.  He’s hungry all the time, doesn’t have a dime to his name though, can’t work because he can’t _stay,_ doesn’t have any papers because he’s been dead a hundred goddamn years.  He only steals enough to survive. The protein bars and canned meat he pockets in odd supermarkets and gas stations taste like dirt going down.

The further into hiding he goes, the more Bucky Barnes resurfaces in broken snippets sent across badly damaged wires.  Bucky’s memory is full of holes, gaping omissions, the bare bones framework of whomever it is he once was. Every emotion feels terrifyingly impulsive.  Before now, there had only been pain or compliance. He still feels like he’s under constant surveillance, the paranoia keeps him moving, makes it harder to sleep than it already is.  If the paranoia doesn’t keep him awake, then the nightmares do.

He dreams of the people who died at his hand, they stare at him with their empty eye sockets and Bucky’s hands aren’t his own as he kills them all over again.  

He dreams of a war he can’t even remember, bombs going off all around, a kid--can’t be older than 18-- bleeding out, asking for his ma and Bucky holds him until he’s dead.  He places riverstones over his eyes and then leaves him there in the mud.

He dreams of being held down, his mouth is covered and he can’t breathe, can’t scream. He looks up and watches the halo descend over him.

He dreams of falling.  Falling falling falling, cold air roaring in his ears, the great blue sky bearing down on him.  He wakes up, sweating and heart pounding, stomach in his throat like he still hasn’t quite yet landed.

He dreams of Steve.  Those are the only dreams that aren’t nightmares, though he always wakes full of aching, and in some ways that’s worse.  It’s hard to be a thing that feels. It’s hard not knowing what any of it means.

 

.---

 

He works in a little shop in Tel Aviv, keeping to himself, only speaking when spoken to first.  It’s very much non-official, in exchange for meals and board. He helps with upkeep and other projects, the occasional menu translation since Bucky speaks 9 languages now, not including computer code.  Maybe more. He didn’t know he was fluent in Mandarin until he was explaining falafel to a pair of tourists who’d wandered in off the beaten path. That was interesting. He can’t understand why Hydra bothered.  He was hardly allowed to speak at all. Over half the time he was actively muzzled.

He doesn’t seem terribly out of place here as long as he keeps his eyes cast down and all the metal covered up.  The streets here are narrow and busy with foot traffic, it’s easy to fade into the crowd. He speaks Hebrew easily, it rolls off his tongue just as familiar as English, and while he can’t remember ever learning it, he’s certain it came from _Before._ Little by little he makes connections, and those connections inform a greater picture.  He knows his mother was Jewish and Romanian, he knows his father was Irish. Bucky knows they died young, and he was reared by his mother’s parents until they passed as well.  Not that Bucky’s remembered much of that on his own, not really, but the library is twelve blocks north with its free WiFi. The _Steve Rogers (Captain America)_ wikipedia page links to _James “Bucky” Buchanan Barnes_ links to old immigration records, marriage licenses, birth and death certificates.  

It’s a surreal thing to read about the birth and death of his entire family in one day, and come away with nothing but steady ambivalence.  He can’t even mourn them properly.

Bucky does print out a picture of Steve to slip into the notebook where he jots down thoughts and memories, times, dates.  Doesn’t know what compels him to send the image to the printer, but he’s standing there waiting for it to finish. Captain America in all his star spangled glory. Sticks out like a sore thumb in combat, he bets, then again that’s probably the point.

 _The hell is this getup? D’ya_ want _to draw all the fire down on your head?_ **_I can take it._ ** _God, don’t say that, it makes my stomach go through the floor.  I know you can lift a tank now, but it don’t mean you’re bulletproof-- and why is this uniform so damn tight?  I can see what religion you are! What kind of pervert dressed you?_

“Is he your favorite?”

Bucky’s head jerks to the right where the voice came from, then slowly he scans down when there’s no one at his shoulder.  A little girl stands at his heel, maybe seven or eight years old, thick glasses weigh across the bridge of her nose.

“What?” Bucky asks, unable to stop himself from cataloguing the room for potential threats just in case.

“Captain America, duh,” she says slowly, like she might be talking to a very small child, “is he your favorite Avenger?”  Bucky makes a noncommittal noise in his throat and shrugs, lets his hair fall across his cheeks. “Yeah, he’s pretty nice.  Thor is stronger though.”

This gets Bucky to turn back toward her and furrow his brow, he feels a little defensive about it.    

She looks up at Bucky, shrugs and says, “He can shoot lightning out of a hammer and he can fly, so...” by way of explanation.  “He’s an alien and a god.”

What the fuck.

“Weird,” Bucky mutters, and tucks the picture into his coat pocket.

 

\---

 

Steve is trying to find him, Bucky knows it only because one by one Hydra satellite operations are being taken out in blazes of fire.

 _Not exactly subtle, are you? It ain’t showing your belly if you just walk away for once in your life._ **_If it’s not me, then it’ll be the next guy. Bad stuff still happens when your back is turned, Buck_ **

Mr. Kohen, the shop owner, brings Bucky a mug of mint tea after he’s finished hanging new vents over the grills.  Bucky nods and thanks him quietly. Steam curls in the air, rising and disappearing. Bucky catches a news alert in his peripheral, sees the familiar shape of destruction, and the even more familiar image of this facility in particular.  It’s where he would wake up from cryo, sometimes. A storage facility of sorts. The image falters, static cutting in and out.

“Could you turn it up, please?” Bucky asks, too soft, Mr. Kohen sings to himself over the grill.  “Mr. Kohen--” he tries again, asks in Hebrew.

Mr. Kohen waves his spatula in the air in acknowledgement and slaps the side of the ancient box TV a few times to clear up the picture, then dials up the volume.

_“A suspected Hydra cell was destroyed just outside of Tiksi, Russia, this Sunday.  This will be the third take down since the Triskelion incident this past winter. The Pentagon does not report any movements in the area at this time, and sources close to the Avengers Initiative have not returned comment.”_

Bucky doesn’t need any admissions to know it’s Steve.  After all, he was completely transparent with his plans to follow Bucky down whatever godforsaken rabbit hole chose for himself.  He wonders if Steve understands why it is Bucky can’t risk getting that close to Hydra, and if he has figured out that this method of tracking won’t work.

Bucky _is_ grateful though, for Steve’s scorched Earth policy when it comes to Hydra, when it comes to _him_.  He probably shouldn’t think about how liberally it could be applied, because some terrible part of Bucky wants to drag Steve to his side and keep him there.  Keep him here in the shadows, where Steve absolutely does not belong.

He watches the fire, the melted steel, the great white expanse of snow that goes on without end, and wonders if Steve is watching the same scene wherever he is.  The flames whip over the horizon, gleaming and starving for oxygen.

 

\---

 

It was only a matter of time before Hydra found him, Bucky supposes.  He knew it from the beginning. He’s honestly shocked it took this long.  

It doesn’t keep him from fighting back, though-- jumping rooftop to rooftop, then down through the streets.  He’s torn whether to head for an area of higher density foot traffic, it’ll be easier to get lost, but most likely will end in mass civilian casualties.  Hydra’s concept of collateral damage is extreme and knows no moral qualms.

Machine gun fire rains over him from a helicopter, making tracks on either side of him as he runs across the city.  Fucking ridiculous. Twelve-Hundred rounds a minute and they still can’t land a shot. No wonder they had to outsource for an assassin, Bucky thinks ruefully, and promptly takes a nasty graze to the left thigh.  It cuts through the material of his trousers, bright and searing over his flesh-- takes the legs out from under him for a moment, but Bucky manages to turn the fall into a roll, and gets back up running. No time to feel pain or look down and see how bad the wound is, there might be time for that later if he can outmaneuver the collection unit.  

He’s aware they’re corralling him, trying to move him toward certain alleyways by cutting off other options.  If it’s a choice Bucky has to make between jumping the obstructions and drawing fire into an innocent crowd, or taking on the maze Hydra is setting out for him, then it’s really no choice at all.  If he were the Asset, the strategy would be automatic, no matter the cost. _Move forward toward the objective, regardless of who stands in your way,_ and even though he isn’t completely _Bucky_ anymore, he isn’t the Asset either, and he doesn’t want any more people dying because of him.

He comes to a fork in the path, and turns right, just because his weight is already carrying him that direction.  There’s no evidence with which to decide if one way might be preferable to the other, which means he’d probably have to fight his way through both.

And he’s cut off.  

A tall cement structure blocks him from the front, helicopter hovering directly above the ledge, and a team of twenty-- no, thirty, men file in from the back, weapons drawn, screaming at him.  He could fight his way through them, or he could dig his hands into the wall until the cement crumbles under his fingers, take it all the way up and neutralize the aircraft-- barring the likelihood that he’ll be hit in the process.

It’s within the split second where he’s deciding which option would yield the higher rate of success where the helicopter wavers ominously through the air and goes spinning wildly away from it’s precarious hovering.  A streak of dark blue plummets over the ledge of the wall, lands directly between Bucky and the ground units, a hand drags him down into a crouch as the squad to the rear opens fire. Bucky covers his head instinctively at the sound, mind not yet caught up as to why the bullets are just ricochetting away. 

“Sorry I’m late,” a voice says, and Bucky jerks his gaze over his shoulder.  Steve meets his eyes for a just a moment before he grimaces and pushes back against the onslaught of firepower.  He quickly presses a hand over his ear and shouts, “Sam, we’re going to need air support. We’re pinned down!” Then, “Lead them back east and we’ll--”

Bucky grabs the material of Steve’s sleeve, and shakes his head, “No. A school lets out over there this time.  Go north, toward the edge of town.”

Steve’s mouth quirks just _so_ and he says, “Sam, you get all that? Good. Clear us a path.” Almost instantaneously the bullets peter off in quantity and Steve says, “We’ll pick off the rest.  Ready? One.. Two…”

Bucky doesn’t wait for the mark, he hauls Steve close by the star across his chest, watches his eyes go big and confused and so so _so_ blue, and says flatly, “If you see them taking me, or I start to lose it, you put a bullet in my head.”

Steve looks like he’s been slapped.  “That’s never gonna happen, Buck,”

“You don’t know that,” Bucky replies, and rolls out from behind the shield, hears Steve calling his name as Bucky charges what’s left of the squad.  His body moves automatically, deflecting bullets and tranq darts with his arm. He crashes into a grouping of twelve men and starts sending them flying in different directions.

At some point Steve enters the fray.  Someone lands a right hook to Bucky’s jaw when he gets distracted watching Steve fight.  He remembers this, almost like a dream, watching Steve move-- small and lithe, tall and svelte-- graceful in both, in different ways.  He uses the shield like an extension of himself, it slices through the air with the same elegance and precision as the rest of him. There’s something to be said about the fact that _this_ is Steve’s weapon of choice.  Not a gun, or knives, or artillery:  A shield. There’s a metaphor to be had here, Bucky is sure of it.

Steve hurdles into the air, body tight, arms crossing over his chest, shoulder tucking as he goes into a spin.  He comes out of the layout with his shield reared back, and uses the power from his weight being pulled back down by gravity to smash into the last of Hydra’s men.  He stands over the unconscious body, and cracks his neck in a way that seems habitual and familiar to Bucky.

“Show off,” Bucky says after a moment, because it seems like the right thing to say.  It lacks inflection, and he can’t look Steve in the eyes when he says it, but at least it gets a huff that might be a laugh out of Steve-- sort of shy and self-deprecatory.

Steve steps toward Bucky and Bucky backs up.

“I’m not gonna-- Jesus, did you get shot?” Steve says, a note of concern touching his voice, he nods toward the blood saturating Bucky’s pant leg.  

“It’s a graze,” Bucky explains, “we need to get out of the city.”  One of the men begin stirring on the ground and Bucky kicks him back unconscious .

“I know, come with me.”

Bucky doesn’t move, he looks nervously back over his shoulder to the great cement wall.  He could probably beat Steve going up, but it wouldn’t be much of a head start. The urge to run is overwhelming.  

Steve sighs.  “Look, one step at a time, okay?  Let me help you get out of here.” His eyes have something in them so beyond tiredness that it makes Bucky waver.  It’s bizarre to be looked at like Bucky will abduct the whole damn world with him if he goes. “I’m not going to let anyone take you,” Steve says quietly, “I just want to get you somewhere safe.”

Bucky stops backing up toward the wall.  Anything to wipe that downcast look off Steve’s face.  

 _Can’t stand it when you’re blue Stevie, you know I can’t._ **_Don’t need your pity._ ** _Ain’t pity._

Bucky takes a step toward Steve, then feels a series of pricks against the back of his neck.

“Oh,” Bucky says, and, “shit.”  He reaches toward the nape of his neck and plucks out three small tranq darts. They roll out of his palm onto the dirt.  His vision is already going double.

“Bucky?” he hears Steve ask, but his voice sounds distant, like he’s being screamed at under water.  “What-- _Sam!_ I need quick pick up, we--” the sounds of metal cutting through air, feet scrambling, and the world narrowing down into one pinpoint of light before it all goes blissfully dark and quiet.

 

\---

 

Bucky hears the whispering first, it filters through the gunk-like haze of his brain as he tries to make sense of it.  The sedation is still beckoning him back down. He makes sure to keep still, keep his breathing even, while the rest of him makes plans to escape.

It doesn’t feel like he’s being restrained, in fact he’s sprawled fairly lazily on his stomach, a cheek pressed against something soft.  A pillow? Definitely a pillow. Who would have bothered to put him in a _bed?_ This isn’t his room above Mr. Kohen’s shop, Bucky knows that too, otherwise his feet would be dangling off the bed by a good four inches, and the mixer-drink smell of strong espresso and cooking oil isn’t a constant lingering presence.  

He’s been moved.

Anxiety spreads sharp and urgent in Bucky’s gut.

He feels pressure against his leg, then the unmistakable jab of a needle.  Something equal parts cold and burning floods the area. There’s a numbness that last a few moments, but then the soreness returns.

“I should do it, he’s going to wake up any second.”

“Should have updated your Red Cross first aid certification before leaving the country, then, huh?”

“I don’t think that’s gonna matter to him, Sam.”

“Well a _band aid_ isn’t going to cut it either.  ‘Graze’ my ass, that’s a bullet hole.  It’s got dirt and shit in it.”

“Maybe we should take him to a hospital.”

“Relax Cap, I’ll have you know my field medic skills are--”

Bucky bolts off the bed, hooks an arm around a neck and pulls them both backward to the floor.  The man lets out a choked, “Wait I--- _hhhkk!”_ as Bucky finds the gun tucked in the back of his trousers, and then shoves him away.  Bucky scrambles into a corner at the far side of the room, presses his back into it and levels the weapon at--

“Steve?”  Bucky pants, when did Steve get here?  He re-directs his aim when the man on the floor moves.  Bucky looks at him in warning, and the man slowly puts his hands up.

“Steady, Bucky,” Steve says gently, and takes a step toward him.  Bucky aims the gun back at Steve. Back to the man on the floor. Back to Steve.  This doesn’t seem to bother Steve at all, he doesn’t even flinch, like he’s accustomed to being caught in someone’s sights.  Or he really thinks Bucky won’t shoot them both dead. He’s probably right about that one.

Bucky turns the gun on himself, puts the muzzle against his temple, and yeah, that does it.  Steve’s eyes go from calm and collected, to absolute terror, in half a second flat. His hands jerk up in surrender, and he goes stock still.

“No hospitals,” Bucky says.

“Bucky, put the gun down.  You’re safe.”

Bucky purses his lips defiantly, and chambers a round, “No. Hospitals.”

“That’s fine, whatever you say,” Steve says, gaze locked on Bucky’s trigger finger, “but you’ve got a bullet stuck in your leg and we need to take it out.”

Bucky flexes the muscles in his thigh, feels fresh blood creeping down his leg.  “You do it,” he says, “Not him.” Bucky’s eyes flick over to the man on the floor.  He recognizes this person, Bucky tried killing him once too. The bird, from the aircraft carrier, right?  Kicked him right off the damn thing. Bucky has attempted to murder a disturbing amount of Steve’s co-workers.  This isn’t the bit which concerns Bucky though, it’s the other bit… being touched by a stranger. Bucky doesn’t trust his own defense mechanisms at this point, he could hurt him by accident, and as far as Bucky knows, this man is just a regular human.  At least Steve has a chance, if Bucky were to lose it, and there’s also the fact that Bucky seems to have an inherent aversion to anything that would bring Steve harm. That last fight over the Potomac drained it all out of him like an infection.

“No problem,” Steve says, “but I’m going to need you to give me the gun, first.”  Bucky hesitates, and Steve’s hands move, but only to rub the heels of his fists over his eyes, “Or keep it, whatever, just don’t do... _that_. Please,” he finishes with a great sigh and folds his arms across his chest.  The posture sets off flashes of memory.

 _You look like your mama when you do that.  I half expect you to start mouthing off at me in Irish to clean my boots off at the front door._ **_Well, get ready because I got a trail of mud right here and it leads to you._ **

“You’re upset.”  

Steve says, “Yeah. My best friend is pointing a gun at his head. I’m upset.”

“Sorry,” Bucky murmurs, lowers the gun, and holds it out toward Steve-- and isn’t that something? Wanting so very much not to disappoint Steve..

“Thank you,” he says,  lets out an long, relieved exhale, palms the grip and proceeds to disassemble the entire thing.  Bucky looks around the room. Definitely some off-the-beaten-path accommodations. The type of place you go when you need to lay low awhile.  Bucky raises an eyebrow at a printed out picture of a farmhouse, framed and nailed to peeling maroon wallpaper. The carpet is dark green and slightly waxy to the touch.  It all smells a bit of mildew and stale cigarettes. Bucky wants nothing more than to throw out a line about the whole thing. _Jesus, Stevie, this dump looks like the pay-by-the-hour on Flatlands.  Could have at least sprung for a 2-star. I’m no street corner floozy, after all._

Instead he tells him, “Told you not to come looking for me.”

“I was in the neighborhood,” Steve says, all mock sincerity.

“You’re a bad liar.”

“Well,” Steve replies, blinking at Bucky with those dark lashes, and shrugging, “you would know.”

“Hey uh,” the man on the floor says, “can I get up yet, or…?”

 

\---

 

“I’m not sure how many of these I should use,” Steve says uncertainly. He examines the pre-loaded syringes in his hand and chews the corner of his bottom lip.

“Skip them,” Bucky tells him.

“I’m going to need to get in there pretty deep to get the bullet, you sure you--”

“Are we the same?”  Bucky asks.

“Are we--what do you-- ” Steve stutters, then seems to understand what Bucky means by it.  “ _Oh._ I don’t know. Maybe, I think.”

Bucky nods down at the numbing agents.  “Do those work on you?”

“No,” Steve confesses, not happy about it.  “Not even close to strong enough.”

“Then we’re the same,” Bucky mutters, and begins unbuttoning his pants.  Steve blinks a few times, goes inexplicably pink at the tips of his ears, and averts his gaze until Bucky’s down to his briefs and sitting on the lid of the toilet.  He nods to Steve, shifting his weight until the wound is easily visualized. “What are you waiting for?” he asks when Steve doesn’t move.

Steve grimaces at the bottle of betadine, the pointed nozzle, then at Bucky’s leg-- and that’s very nice.  Steve’s nice. He’s afraid of hurting Bucky. It’s nice, and entirely unnecessary. Bucky snatches the bottle.  Steve gasps and says, “Hold on--!” while Bucky douses the area in disinfectant, feels little particles of dirt run out of the wound. He hands the bottle back to Steve who fixes Bucky with a comically beleaguered look.

“S’ clean now.”

“I had it.”

“Didn’t seem like it,” Bucky says, and hates how every word he says to Steve comes out sounding so unsure.  Like his own words haven’t yet found a home in his mouth.

“I’ll move fast,” Steve promises, “looks like you’re already trying to heal.  I had a projectile get sealed off once when I waited too long. Harder to get them out after that happens.”

“You’re stalling.”

Steve grimaces and says, “Yeah,” and reaches toward Bucky’s leg.  “Tell me if you need me to stop a minute,” and Steve’s gloved fingertips brush against the bare skin of Bucky’s thigh and Bucky suppresses a shiver that runs inconsistently against the instinct that screams DANGER and tells Bucky to throw Steve backward through the wall.

He curls his hands in his lap.

“You okay?” Steve taps Bucky’s knee with the forceps, and looks pointedly at Bucky’s fists, the white knuckles of his regular hand.  Bucky nods, and Steve blows out a breath and begins the extraction. There’s pain, of course there’s pain, but Bucky is always in pain.  He has an arm his body constantly wants to reject, but his cells regenerate too fast to allow it to happen. He knows how to compartmentalize it.  He only flinches a little when Steve has to dig in a little roughly, because he was right and the wound was already starting to heal over-- he has to make new wounds in order to fix the old ones.

Steve murmurs, “Shit… M’sorry,” sort of absently.  A little crease appears between his brow. Bucky has a vague impression of smoothing it away with his thumb.

 _Stop lookin’ so mad, it’ll give you wrinkles.  What that book ever do to you?_ **_Not mad, just trying to concentrate._ ** _Oooh I see, am I distracting you?_ **_Always._ **

“Sam will be back with some dinner soon.  I know you gotta be starving.” Bucky doesn’t say anything and Steve purses his lips.

“I tried to kill him,” Bucky confesses, even though Steve was there.  

“That wasn’t you.  You didn’t have a choice, anyone who’s seen Hydra’s files understands that.”

“And Romanov.  Shot her too.”

“Bucky--”

“I killed Howard Stark.  Killed his wife,” Bucky says and Steve goes still.  “You think his boy understands _that?”_

He looks down at Steve and expects to find disgust, anger, any number of things that Bucky deserves.  Howard was an eccentric, wildcard of a man-- and he was their friend. Did everything he could to help fight the war alongside them, the same way Steve fights with Howard’s son at his shoulder, now.  That used to be Bucky.

But Steve just meets him with those kind, sorrowful eyes and says softly, “I know...” and he looks way, pulls the bullet out of Bucky’s leg with a quick tug of the forceps.

\---

 

Steve and Sam both try to pull him into innocuous conversation over the course of the evening.  It’s difficult with Steve though, Bucky knows that Steve is holding back a world of things he wants to say, and Steve _knows_ that Bucky _knows,_ and it results in a simmering tension that neither of them seem to be able to navigate.

Sam in particular does his best to put Bucky at ease, fills in all the charged lulls in conversation with the sort of wit and self-assuredness that automatically makes a person want to lower their defenses.  He’s the type of person that others gravitate toward because positivity and confidence is infectious. And people like to smile. Bucky used to smile. Sometimes for no reason at all.

Sam also chafes at him, when he stands too close to Steve.

Steve disappears outside of the door for a moment to take a call, and Bucky ought to be worried about that, it could be _anyone_ on the other end of the line just waiting for a scrap of information that will lead to Bucky’s collection.

“It’s just Natasha,” Sam says, and Bucky cuts his eyes away from the door.  “She checks in every once in awhile. Makes sure we haven’t done anything dumb like take on a Hydra cell in the middle of lunch rush in Tel Aviv.”

“She’s gonna be pretty disappointed then.”

“That’s nothing new,” Sam laughs, then reaches toward Bucky, and Bucky reflexively grabs him by the wrist before he even knows what for.  He’s holding him too hard, the pressure sensors in his palm grind against the protrusion of his radius, but Sam doesn’t try to jerk away or call out for Steve.  He simply says, “Hey man, I know you’ve had a long day, but you’re hogging all the knish. Sharing is caring.”

Bucky withdraws hastily.  “Sorry,” he mumbles. “I don’t mean to..”

Sam nods scrapes food onto his paper plate, “I get it. Struggled with some PTSD myself after coming back from Kandahar.  My dad must’ve moved too quick, tried to pat me on my shoulder and get my attention-- socked him right in the jaw. Figured it was time to get help after that.”

Bucky doesn’t know what PTSD is, but certainly understands the feeling of a body operating without the conscious consent of the mind.

Sam looks toward the door, and Bucky looks too.  Bucky can hear Steve’s low tones, if he concentrated he’d be able to hear him word for word.  When he turns back to Sam, Sam is staring at him again, but his eyes are wary now.

“He wants to bring you home, you know.”

Bucky knows.  Of course he knows.  “I can’t,” he says, “I shouldn’t even be here now.  I’m dangerous. For him. For everyone.”

“Maybe you should let Steve decide what’s best for himself.”

This takes Bucky aback. “I’m trying to protect him.”  

“Did he ask you for that?”  

Bucky doesn’t answer.  Steve’s too busy shielding the rest of the world with his body, doesn’t give a thought to himself.  He was like that before the serum, it’s the most fundamental part of Steve. Bucky remembers the dark stab of fear after Steve sat him down and explained Erskine’s experiment.  First there was relief, because Steve wasn’t going to be shaking and wheezing with asthma anymore, wouldn’t be in pain because of his scoliosis, he could finally run without his heart murmur acting up-- without Bucky grabbing him by the scruff of the neck and fussing at him to take it easy.  Steve could finally see _color_ and--

 **_What you staring at, punk? I got something on my face?_ ** _No, it’s just..  It’s just that-- your eyes are real blue, Buck._ **_Ho.ly. Shit. You seeing color now?_ ** _Thought I was going off my rocker at first.  Stared at a tree for a solid hour, thought no way the world looks like this all over.  Nearly cried when I saw a little girl wearing a purple ribbon, didn’t even--Bucky? Are you getting teary eyed on me, now?_ **_No, course not.. Damn wind has me dried out._ **

But Bucky did cry, later on when he was in his tent alone at night, not able to sleep and wanting Steve next to him so much that his teeth ached. It brought Bucky unspeakable joy that the world was within Steve’s grasp, but with it came all the ugliness too.  Steve would be a walking target now. He’d exchanged one type of danger for another, far larger, type of danger-- and how could Bucky hope to protect him under the feeble safety of his hands? He was only one man, and Steve was.. Everything else.

“---about you?”

“What?” Bucky asks, too lost in his own head to have caught Sam’s question.

“I said, you’re so worried about everyone else, but have you thought about what you need?  What happens to you effects Steve, whether you want it to or not. Might as well be in it together.”

“What I need is to be left alone,” Bucky says and looks back toward the door.

Sam sighs and shakes his head.  “Try telling him that.”

“Steve’s stubborn.”

“Exactly. Can’t both of y'all be stubborn.  You keep running, he’ll keep following. Don’t think he’ll just give up, we both know he’s not that type of guy.”

Bucky’s mouth twitches fondly.  “You probably shouldn’t be flying around out here either.”  

“I trust his judgement.  Simple as that.”

“Thank you..” Bucky murmurs after a moment.  “For having his back.” When Bucky can’t, he means.

Sam nods knowingly and finishes his dinner.

 

\---

 

He waits until Sam has gone into his own room, and Steve is making those light, deep breaths against his pillow. Steve still sleeps all scrunched up into a ball, Bucky realizes, like he’s still 5’4 and huddling in on himself for warmth.  Bucky stares at him like that awhile, the fan of his eyelashes, the lack of tension in the set of his mouth, the little dreamlike twitches of his body-- and commits it to memory. Measures it up against other flickering images that Bucky thought might just be the constructions of his imagination.

The urge to reach out and stroke the bow of Steve’s lips pulls at him.  It seizes down into Bucky’s fingertips, and Steve’s lips look so soft and pink and--

Bucky isn’t _allowed._ He knows that.

He’s moves without sound, gathering a couple things from the room.  Steve will be too pissed about Bucky running out into the night that he won’t miss this backpack full of MRE’s and whatever snacks it is that Steve hauls around with him these days.  Has to be better than the gel supplements Hydra saddled Bucky with when he had to work in the field for any length of time. Bucky takes some of Steve’s clothes and tries not to think about how he’s repaying Steve’s kindness with deceit-- but all he has left is a pair of bloody jeans, a shirt and coat covered in grime, and the sleep clothes Steve has already lent him.  He even finds a pair of gloves with a tag still attached, wonders if Steve had the foresight to get these for him, then immediately feels overly presumptuous for it.

Bucky finds a pen and a shred of paper, and tries to think of something to write.  He sets it aside. He doesn’t doesn’t know how to put what he feels into words anymore, everything is either so buried that Bucky can’t access it, or it’s something so raw to the touch that words aren’t enough.  He almost writes _Please don’t hate me for this--_ for all the running, he means,  all the fighting and bleeding Steve does for Bucky’s ghost.  But that’s too selfish.

Bucky thinks he might always have been selfish when it comes to Steve.  Used to bother him to no end that people scorned Steve because he was small and artsy and introverted.  No one could appreciate him like Bucky could, and it made Bucky feel proud. To him Steve was brilliant and unfairly talented, a spitfire with a heart of gold, and had anyone actually _seen_ Steve a little rumpled from sleep?  All soft eyed and fuzzy at the edges, before the invisible weight he shouldered crashed down on him.  No, _Bucky_ was the lucky one. Felt like he’d uncovered this brilliant gem in the middle of the Brooklyn slum.  

Peggy saw that in Steve too.

Bucky doesn’t remember much about Peggy.  He thinks he liked her-- liked her for how she liked Steve the same way Bucky did.  So yeah, she was in Bucky good books, aside from the fact that he’d felt a wretched need to jump between her and Steve with his arms stretched out to keep them apart.  Bucky remembers that feeling more clearly than the rest of his impressions.

 _I better go show Peggy these journals we collected from the Hamburg raid._ **_Oh, that’s what we’re callin’ it these days? ‘Showing the journals’ my ass. Why are you laughing?_ ** _Because I have no idea what you’re talking about.  Peggy and I we’re just-- it’s not like--_ **_I seen the way she looks at you, it’s pretty clear you two are carrying the torch.  She’s gonna take you out to London and put a ring on you, and then it’ll be all, “Bucky who?”_ ** _You really think I could-- Bucky…  I could never forget about you._

Strange how that worked out in the end, Bucky thinks.  He’d been so worried about Steve moving on without him, that it never occurred to Bucky that _he’d_ be the one doing all forgetting, and all the leaving.

 

\---

 

Bucky doesn’t set eyes on Steve again until he’s watching him on TV through the window of a fucking Best Buy in Winnipeg.

Once again, New York has been targeted by some nefarious entity or another--  they run together for Bucky, he can’t keep up with which is which. They’re all in need of fighting off, so what does it matter.  Except these look a little less human than what Bucky’s accustomed to, what with the extra pair of arms( _??)_ and a domed disc where a head ought to be.  Bucky wonders if the world has always been such a dumping ground for extraterrestrial conquests, and maybe he just didn’t catch word back in the day because even an alien hellbent on beating the earth into submission would have been too afraid to set foot in their fucking neighborhood after the sun went down.

Whomever is recording seems to have a death wish because there’s various projectiles flying all around, including the occasional bystander not fast enough to clear the street.  Steve has to be down there somewhere. The footage is all wobbly and hazy from the dust, and Bucky can only make out the Iron Man. He’s a gold and red streak cutting across the sky, and Stark’s boy seems to have inherited his father’s piloting aptitude. He appears to see something on ground level from his spot in the clouds, and Bucky gets nervous watching him go into a tailspin, taking it down in a quick, tight spiral.  He fires off some sort of repulsor beam, sends a pile of aliens flying every which way, before pulling up sharply at the last second.

Bucky doesn’t see where he goes after that, because now he notices what it was the guy was trying to clear out, and now Bucky has to get closer to the glass, has to take a shaky breath and clench his fists because there’s _Steve_ .  Right in the middle of it all, fists and shield flying, not even missing a beat despite having just gotten dog piled by a bunch of extraterrestrials. His face is streaked with dirt, there’s some sort of blue substance which Bucky assumes is alien blood smeared over his throat.  Steve bares his teeth when one of the dome heads starts swinging down on him-- and he’s beautiful like this. He’s beautiful, and Bucky is going out of his mind with anxiety watching him. Doesn’t matter how strong and resistant and and powerful Steve is, and sure he’s got a whole team better suited for it than Bucky, but Bucky can’t shake the mindset that Steve is _his_ to protect.  It’s a paradox of a thing, because part of Bucky can _still_ feel the urge to complete the mission Hydra designated him for, can still hear those whispered words and the imperative to comply pulling at him.  

That’s why he can’t be around Steve. Bucky can’t be trusted, it takes constant vigilance not to slip.  And the Bucky before _this_ version of himself would never have--

Bucky is helpless when he sees what’s about to happen, he notices some sort of RPG tech being loaded, but Steve doesn’t.  Steve is too busy trying to lift half a goddamn building off a city bus so a load of civilians can head for cover. “Hey,” Bucky murmurs, like Steve can even hear him, “eyes six o’clock. C’mon man.”  

A couple people who’ve gathered to watch the footage glance over to Bucky, and Bucky purses his lips and pulls up his coat collar.  

“Come on, c’mon, c’mon, get em’ out of there,” Bucky says under his breath, watches the last person clear the bus.  But it’s too late. Steve turns around just in time to see the missile go off, tenses, and uses his one spare moment to pull up his shield before impact.

Bucky watches in horror as Steve is thrown backward, the camera can’t track his overhead path as he whips past it.  A few people around Bucky gasp, some let out sympathetic _oooh’s_ , and Bucky is frozen to the spot as the camera operator begins running toward Steve.  They find him crumpled on the ground, eyes closed and out cold, he’s bleeding from both his ears, his nose, it’s in his hair, on his lips, it’s fucking everywhere.

Bucky drops the bag of groceries he’d been carrying without a thought, and turns on his heel.

 

\---

 

Within 24 hours Bucky is in midtown Manhattan.  It’s drizzling out, a mid-autumn chill has people bundled up in raincoats and scarves. Whatever the threat was, it must be over now, because in true New York fashion, everyone seems back to business.  Pedestrians step in front of cabs and get the horn blared at them, their eyes pass over the clean up and construction crews before staring straight forward again.

Bucky stands outside the perimeter of the Avengers headquarters.  This is where Steve boards when he’s in New York. Bucky remembers that from the profile Pierce had given him. Stark has a medical ward in there equipped to meet the special requirements among some of his team members, and Bucky has no idea how bad off Steve is, there’s been no news so far.

Even if there had, Bucky isn’t sure he’d be able to rest until he set eyes on Steve himself to be _sure._

This isn’t going to be like breaking into Steve’s apartment building in D.C., Bucky thinks despairingly.  The security isn’t going to be an easy breach. Bucky digs around in his backpack and begins sorting through the tech he’d lifted off a team of Hydra agents that had tailed him out of Cairo.  He palms a few frequency scramblers, and those--coupled with Bucky’s own technical capabilities-- should do the trick of getting him in and out. Barring the likelihood that it won’t be enough to measure up against whatever contingencies Stark has in place to prevent hacking.  

“It’d be easier to knock,” a woman’s voice says, and Bucky lashes out involuntarily, reaches back and grabs an arm and begins to twist them down to the ground-- but she slides right out of his grasp in a few easy steps.  “Take it easy,” she says evenly, hands spread in front of her, “sorry, shouldn’t have snuck up on you like that. Was afraid you’d run if you saw me coming.” She straightens, blows a chunk of red hair out of her eyes, but keeps her hands where Bucky can see them.

“Still might,” Bucky says, looking around the street, taking in every escape route, every person whose eyes linger a moment too long.  

“You recognize me?” She asks, and Bucky does.  Of course he does. He nods, a quick jerk of the head, eyes flicking to a violet bruise across her right eye.  She smiles. “You should see the other guy.”

“What do you want?”

“You’ve been standing out here for two hours in the rain, seems like I should ask you the same thing.”

“I don’t want to hurt him,” Bucky blurts.

Romanov’s expression gentles for a moment, “I believe you.”

“I saw him on the news. I just wanted to make sure he was... okay.”  Bucky starts to turn, “I shouldn’t be here.”

“Why don’t you come see for yourself,” Romanov calls out, and Bucky stops, apprehensive.  “JARVIS is great, but not all of us love having our vitals tracked twenty-four-seven.”

“In exchange for what?”

“This isn’t _quid pro quo._ Steve is my friend, too.”

Bucky shifts on his feet.  “Why would you help me?” After everything, he means, after what Bucky has done to her _and_ to Steve.  

She twists her umbrella in her hands and her focus hardens.  “Let’s just say your file and mine look a lot alike. I know telling you that it wasn’t your fault doesn’t fix anything, doesn’t change what was done, so I’ll spare you the platitude.  I wouldn’t have come out the other side without the kindness of strangers. Looks like you could use a little bit of that too, right now.” Romanov blinks and lets out a sardonic laugh.  “Anyways, what’s the worst that could happen?”

Bucky can think of at least a hundred off the top of his head, but instead he says, “Alright.” and takes to Romanov’s heel when she gives him a half smile and nods for him to follow.

 

\---

 

“Third door on the right. Hold out your hands,”  she whispers, and rolls her eyes at Bucky’s hesitation.  “Relax, I’m not cuffing you.” She takes a black band from around her own wrist, and snaps it over Bucky’s.  “This will mask your physical signature,” she explains, then she holds up a small disc, no bigger than a dime, pinched between her thumb and forefinger, “and _this_ should scramble the output of any electric fields your arm discharges.”  

Bucky holds still, the disc fastens itself like a magnet against his upper arm, causes a ripple of static to resonate in Bucky’s molars for a moment.  He shivers all over, but he’s still wet from the rain so it could be that. “Third door on the left? That’s it?” he asks, because it really seems too simple.

“Yeah.  Rogers never locks up.  I guess he forgets some of us have very sordid histories as criminals and spies, and thinks we won’t raid his pantry after the common room runs out of snacks.  Anyways, he’s not there right now, but after yesterday we’ve got press and politicians all over the place-- which is where I ought to be right now, actually. So this is where the tour ends.”

“This was a bad idea,” Bucky says under his breath, looking toward Steve’s door.

“Do you want to see him, or not?”

“Steve hates surprises.”  

“Something tells me he’ll be okay with this one.  Those devices go dead in six hours, make the best of it, and tell Rogers I said ‘your welcome’,” she says, and nudges him forward.

 

\---

 

Steve isn’t there, just like Romanov said, and Bucky does have the sense to lock the door behind himself.  Steve coming in unexpectedly is one thing, but anyone else would be a disaster. It wouldn’t do for an Avenger to come seeking out a can of mixed nuts, and find Bucky instead.

It’s an apartment layout, generous open plan, floor to ceiling windows in the living area that Bucky avoids the best he can.  A far cry from their little abode in Brooklyn. Bucky can’t remember the floor plan exactly, but he remembers leaks from the ceiling that they caught in old coffee tins.  The windows didn’t seal properly, and they’d stuff socks in cracks. There were fissures in the plaster where you could see straight through to the wood beams. All of that dilapidation, and they still managed to make it feel like it was one of those nice apartments on Ashland Place.  Steve would stick his pictures up on the walls to cover the holes, and during spring, Bucky would bring in flowers from the gardens and set them up in a vase on the window sill.

It doesn’t look like Steve in here.  The walls are sterile, empty of art, the white walls surround Bucky like a set of teeth.  There are a few shelves full of books, some records, but otherwise it’d be hard to tell Steve spent any time here at all.  Bucky finds Steve’s bedroom, he stands in the doorway and turns a dial for light. It’s not much better in here. There aren’t drawing supplies scattered around the bedside table like it was back home.  

Steve would sit up in his bed when the pneumonia caught him, he’d look out the window and sketch for hours.  Wasn’t like their view was great either; a rusty fire escape and the dump down below, but Steve’s eyes saw beautiful thing when he looked out that window.  He saw the way the shadows twisted between the buildings and made intersecting patterns across white sheets hung out to dry. He saw wind blowing old Mrs. Pulaski’s gray hair across her face as she sat knitting on her stoop.  Steve saw the way moonlight made the rain against the window glitter like pale diamonds.

Bucky always wondered what it was Steve saw when he looked at him.  He wonders what it is Steve sees now, and dreads the knowledge of it all at once.

Steve must have been in the middle of folding laundry when he got the call, there’s a couple neat stacks of clothes set atop a dresser, but the rest remains in a hasty pile on the floor.  Bucky smiles to himself, imagines Steve hopping around to get a sock on while he tries to find the rest of his uniform.

He walks toward the clothes, stoops over and grabs a gray t-shirt off the carpet and folds it up, sets it with the others on top of the dresser.  Steve would do this for him, sometimes, always said Bucky never folded stuff up the right way, he was particular about it. Sometimes Bucky would do a quarter fold on the flannels just to irk him.  

They used to bicker over the dumbest things, get cross and Bucky would stomp around while Steve gave him the silent treatment and Bucky _hated_ that passive aggressive shit.  He hated Steve’s silence wielded like a weapon, because any other person and Steve would’ve mouthed off like he was 7 foot tall and unbreakable.  He knew exactly how to get Bucky riled up, punish him with that determined stoicism. Bucky would want to get over him in those moments, shake him up a little the same way Bucky always felt shaky around him, make him lose some of that stubborn composure.

Those memories smart in a way Bucky can’t put his finger on, makes him yearn for something long since passed.  Bittersweet and sore all over.

Bucky isn’t sure what else to do, so he keeps folding-- bundles up matching socks, tries to smooth out some of the wrinkles in a plaid shirt.  It’s mindless and takes the edge off of Bucky’s nerves. He can still make out Steve’s underlying scent beneath the detergent, the same subtle sweetness he’s always carried on his skin.  Even when he was sick and sweating out a fever, Bucky would still try getting his nose tucked into Steve’s collar under the guise of helping him out of bed. Something so damn addictive about him.  Otherwise Bucky would be able to stay away, can’t leave him well enough alone. Has to keep creeping in on the edges like some grim specter.

Bucky jumps when the bedroom door flies wide open, and within a second, Bucky is flat on his back, arms pinned up over his head and he’s staring up into blue.

“ _Bucky?”_

Bucky’s hands are shaking, everything fighting against being held down, but Bucky manages a weak, “Hi,” then, “You’re okay.”  

“What?” Steve asks, his eyes everywhere Bucky is, “ _oh,_ no, that was-- that was nothing.  A few broken ribs, blew out my eardrums, looked worse than--” he shakes his head, “Bucky, how did you get in here?”

Steve’s body is heavy and furnace hot on top of him, it’s beginning to make a different sort of nervous energy twist up Bucky’s spine.  “Romanov. She lent me this,” Bucky turns the wrist with the band in Steve’s hand, and Steve releases his grip, slides his fingertips over the hard plastic.

“How long before..?"

“Six hours. Closer to five, now.”

Steve frowns, the nail of his thumb catches a bit on the thin skin mapping over Bucky’s radial artery and Bucky tries to suppress a shiver.

“You’re shaking,” Steve says quietly, “Jesus Bucky, you’re soaking wet.”

“It was raining.  Steve could you…” Bucky clenches his jaw and stares up at the ceiling because he can’t look down and see himself pressed up against Steve like this, it’s confusing, his head goes spinning in all directions.

“Right, sorry, sorry, I just-- I was surprised.  Here,” he helps Bucky up and turns toward the dresser.  “The bathroom is that way, here’s some dry clothes. Everything is in there if you want to take a shower.”

“Okay,” Bucky murmurs, “thanks.”

“Of course,” Steve says, and gives Bucky a small smile.  “I’m glad you’re here, pal.”

 

\---

 

Bucky finds Steve in the kitchen after he’s done cleaning himself up.  He makes sure to bump a chair, make some noise so he doesn’t give Steve any more surprises.  

Steve turns around, gives Bucky a quick once-over, before turning back to his pantry.  “I haven’t stayed here in awhile. I’m still more or less stationed in D.C., and this past year I’ve been… out of the country a lot,” he says, pushing aside a box of crackers, “I haven’t really been shopping.  Thought I had more in here, still.”

“I’m not hungry,” Bucky says, even though it’s not really the truth.  He hasn’t eaten since leaving Manitoba, and his metabolism definitely demands more than that.  But he doesn’t want Steve worrying about him.

“We’re the same, remember? Always need to eat,” Steve says, shooting Bucky a look over his shoulder.  “After fights like that, I swear I’m more garbage disposal than human over the next 48 hours. Not really a perk.”

“Peanut butter’s gotten a lot better since our time.  Lots of protein.” Bucky says awkwardly.

“I _know._ You can go to this place called Costco now and get an entire 80 ounce container of it.  I’ll go through that in two weeks.” He turns to Bucky and chews his bottom lip a moment.  “We can order something.”

“I’m leaving in a few hours.  Don’t worry about--”

“Come to D.C. with me.  Or wherever, it doesn’t matter.”

Bucky groans and puts his face in his hands.  “Steve, I _can’t.”_

Steve sits heavily in the chair across from Bucky.  “Tell me why.”

Bucky looks up at him and shakes his head.  “I can’t yet.”

“Yet?” Steve asks, some of the sadness and determination melting ever so slightly from his eyes, “So, you will stay, eventually.”

“I..” Bucky scrubs his hands over his face again, “I don’t know.”

Steve crosses his arms over his chest and leans back in the seat, still mad about it, but apparently willing to let it go for the time being.

Bucky gestures at the walls, the shelves, “Little plain in here.  You don’t draw anymore?”

“Haven’t had much time,” Steve sighs, “or.. I don’t know.  I pick up the pencil, and then spend forever looking at the paper and nothing ever comes out.”

“That…” Bucky glances around again at the bareness, the lack of color and personality, “You depressed, or something?.”

Steve laughs, “You’re asking _me?”_

“Are you?”

Steve’s smile falters, he looks away.  “Guess I don’t really think about it like that.”

“We snuck into a Picasso gallery,” Bucky says all of sudden, because it’s _there,_ in his head all of a sudden and if he doesn’t write it down or say it out loud, the image will dissolve.  “Before I enlisted. They’d brought some of his paintings over from Paris during the occupation. It was supposed to be a private party, but somehow we got by the guard.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, all excited and leaning forward again, “You tried to pay a lady a buck to flirt with the guard, but she said she’d do it for free if you took her dancing that weekend.”  

“I don’t recall that.”

“You took her out a whole month, Bucky.”

Bucky shrugs.  “I just remember us sneaking through the door.  There was this one picture…”

“ _Ma Jolie,”_ Steve murmurs, eyes fixed on Bucky.  “You said it looked like a whole lot of nothing, bunch of scribble scrabble.”

“But that’s what you loved about it.  Told me it was every point of view happening all at once, all the planes and angles-- imagining the ones we can’t even see.  Got this look in your eye, the way you’re looking at me right now, and said people were a lot like that. All made up of different dimensions, whole bits hidden away from view, and that’s why we got to work hard to look past the surface to find the good in things.”  It’s the most Bucky has said all at once in over a year. He blinks and looks down at Steve’s hands, his long fingers, and wants to touch them. Instead he asks, “When did you stop drawing?”

Steve opens his mouth, closes it.  Slowly pulls his hands off the table, sets them in his lap, and says, “Since you fell.”

 

\---

 

A red light on the band is flashing.  Has been for the past hour, slow at first, but now it’s obviously a warning because the blinking has sped up.

Steve reaches toward Bucky, turns the hand palm up in the cradle of his fingers. Steve purses his lips, frowns.  “You know this doesn’t mean you have to leave. I’ll go explain the situation right now. Tony doesn’t know...that.  He just knows it was Hydra’s doing. He doesn’t need to know the rest of it.”

“No,” Bucky shakes his head and stands, “if you don’t think that will eat away at you, it will.  Won’t have you lying for me.” He reaches for the door, but Steve is grabbing Bucky by the elbow and pulling him-- and just like that he’s got his arms around Bucky.  At first it feels like he’s been caught in a vice, because he’s been taught to feel like that, but Steve doesn’t crush or immobilize. His arms rest gently around the crown of Bucky’s shoulders, their chests pressed together, and Bucky stands stiff as a board, but Steve is steadfast in his embrace.  Bucky’s forgotten how to allow this, how to let his body relax and let it happen.

“I miss you,” Steve whispers against his own forearm.  “It was bad enough before, woke up and you were still gone.  Everyone was gone and the world was gone too, in a way. It’s almost worse now, though.  Hate knowing you’re out there and I’m here. It doesn’t feel right.”

Bucky’s hands tremble when they touch the line of Steve’s spine.

 

\---

 

They find him in Glasgow, West Virginia.  A population of 860 people, most of them over the age of 70, in the heart of a dying coal county, and this is where they come to collect.

It isn’t a Hydra team, they don’t carry Hydra tech, but it’s most likely a hostile intelligence agency, former KGB, possibly bounty hunters.  One minute Bucky is walking past the little park by the water purification plant, there’s a flash of electricity that starts in his arm, then wraps like lightning all around, and the next thing Bucky sees are fan blades circling overhead.

“No,” he says and immediately goes to pulling against the metal bands holding him to the table, “no, no, no,” the electric current starts pulsating through his body and Bucky convulses with it.

They’re speaking in Russian, whispering, “What do we do now?”

“Do you have the book?”

“Yes _.”_

“Well read the words before he breaks out, idiot!”

Bucky gasps when the current breaks off, cranes his head on the table and finds two men standing in a corner.  One of them holds something: A red book. A black star.

“ _Longing.”_

Bucky doesn’t even beg for them to stop, the way he used to when he first realized what these words could do.  Time is precious, they can’t make it to the end. He concentrates, puts all his focus into pulling against the metal bands.  The moment he struggles, the electric current starts again. He grits his teeth through the pain of it.

“ _Rusted.  Seventeen.  Daybreak.”_

He can feel those words, each syllable a physical weight that buries Bucky underneath layers and layers of nothingness.

“ _Furnace.  Nine. Benign.”_

One metal band pulls apart at his chest, and the electricity abruptly cuts off.

“ _Homecoming.  One.”_

Bucky gets his hands free, and rips the rest of the restraints off with his hand.  He can feel himself going, the Asset coming forefront in his mind like another person entirely.  

“ _Frei--”_

He grabs the man by the throat, and closes his fist. Keeps him from talking. The Asset--Bucky--the Asset, something glitches between the two, his identity wavering in and out.  Bucky wants to simply silence the man and run, but the Asset does not stop squeezing until he hears something snap. He catches the man’s partner running for the door, and Bucky pulls him back by the collar, throws him upward against the ceiling and watches him fall heavy back to the floor.  

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Bucky says, while the Asset drags the man off the floor and onto the table that just held Bucky.  He bends the metal bands back in place, finds the motion trigger for the shock plates, and switches it on. The man is still screaming when The Asset walks out into the night.

 

\---

 

The Asset is the one that goes to Steve, no matter how much Bucky pulls against the compulsion.  Steve is an incomplete mission. The Asset has to move until the mission’s objective has been met.  

He enters from the top of the building, finds the fire escape and begins climbing down to Steve’s floor.  For a moment, Bucky gets in control of his body, digs his hands against the rail until the wrought iron creaks and bends under his fingers.  But soon he’s moving again, finding Steve’s window and peaking through it. The light is dim, almost completely dark, but otherwise there’s no movement inside, and _thank god,_ Bucky thinks, maybe he isn’t home.

That hope is dashed to pieces when Steve emerges from around a corner with a bowl in his hands, completely unaware as he sits long ways on the sofa.  

Make a noise, Bucky says to himself, anything, just get Steve’s attention.

The most warning Steve gets is the Asset’s arm breaking through the glass of the window, followed by the rest of him.

Steve scrambles off the sofa, and is immediately thrown to the floor.  He grapples with the Asset, lands a solid punch into his ribs, legs kicking out to switch their positions-- but the Asset slams him down to the ground again. _No no no no no_ Bucky screams in his own head, fights the Asset for control.  But the Asset gets his hand around Steve’s throat, and this finally gets Steve’s fingers scrabbling against metal.  And he goes still. Steve goes still and the Asset goes still with him.

Steve is wide eyed with recognition as he peers up through darkness, past the limp curtain of Bucky’s hair, and he’s saying Bucky’s name, over and over.  “Bucky, Bucky c’mon. I know you can hear me. It’s all right _.”_ Steve doesn’t struggle at all.  His thumb rubs a soothing circle against cold metal.

Something shifts abruptly within the Asset.  All the violence is still there, pushing outward in search of completion, but tempered by a different sort of ferocity-- something borne much deeper than the Asset’s programming, a vein of longing that belongs only to Bucky, all of it hopelessly intermingling.  His hand loosens itself, a fingertip grazes over Steve’s mouth, and a soft huff of air escapes from Steve’s lungs when his lips part. The Asset’s hand doesn’t stop moving, and Bucky is suspended in some liminal space that he can’t stim from, trying to regain control, and trying to understand what’s happening all at once.

The fingers over Steve’s lips, turn into fingers buried in Steve’s hair.  The Asset’s fist tightens and Steve goes with it so _easily--_ breathes shallowly and allows his throat to be bared.  Allows the Asset to lean down, _too close too close too close_ Bucky thinks frantically.  The Asset’s other hand, the one that can feel the heat pouring off Steve’s skin, it moves from its spot pinning down a shoulder.  Rests low against Steve’s fifth and sixth ribs, and _there_ , just there, the Asset and Bucky both feel the relentless hammering of Steve’s heart.  

Steve lets out a shaky, “...Bucky?” but it isn’t his name that pulls Bucky out, it’s the beating of his heart, the miracle of it.  The memory of counting Steve’s pulse, touching him here as they slept next to one another, the murmur of malfunctioning valves that preoccupied Bucky’s mind and kept him from resting.  All the bargaining he did with the universe in the black of night, willing to trade it all, because none of it was worth a damn if he didn’t have Steve. He didn’t want to exist in a world that would allow such bitter roots to grow, and choke away all the things that were good and kind.  Life couldn’t be that indiscriminate, could it?

Buck gasps and flings his body backward, he pulls himself up to standing and clenches his hands in his hair to keep them from reaching out again..

Steve slowly gets to his feet.  “What happened? Who did this you?”

“Put me down,” Bucky rasps.  “Hurry up, before--”

“Just calm down,” Steve says, hands up, big beautiful idiot that he is.

“Do it! Or I’m _going_ to hurt someone!”  His body takes a step toward Steve with no input from the rest of him, and the tremors in Bucky’s hands gets worse the harder he balls his fists.    “Now Steve, do it now! Fucking--”

Steve swings.

 

\---

 

Bucky wakes up in bed, he’s in control of his body again.  He tells his fingers to move and they do it, he shifts and it’s because Bucky made it happen and not the Asset.  His head throbs and Bucky props himself up on his elbows to crack his neck. He has wires coming off him, little sticky probes against his temple, he reaches to yank them off.

“Hey, could you please… not do that?”

That isn’t Steve’s voice.

Bucky jerks his head and finds a man sitting with a laptop on knees.  He has on glasses and a wrinkled blazer. Salt and pepper hair curls at his temples.  Bucky recognizes him immediately and remains absolutely still. Hands carefully lowering to the bed.

“I keep telling these guys I’m not a medical doctor.”

“I know who you are,” Bucky says warily.  He’d almost been given a mission to collect Banner as a potential asset, but that mission was scrapped as soon as Hydra figured out what they would be up against and didn’t like the odds.

“Sorry, this must be weird for you.  Cap thought he’d be back before you woke up.  He must have found what he was looking for.”

Slowly, Bucky touches his temple and winces.

“Yeah. Pretty sure he gave you a subdural hematoma.  But that’s like a papercut to you guys.”

Bucky shakes off a little residual disorientation, asks, “How long have I been out?”

“Twelve hours?  Give or take. Pretty sure only half of that was healing time.  Your brainwaves are pretty...uh. When’s the last time you slept?”

“Where’s Steve?”

Banner makes a face like he isn’t so sure he should tell Bucky, and that alone informs Bucky precisely where Steve has gone.  “Shit,” Bucky mutters, and begins getting off the bed, swaying on his feet. “They’re not going to be much help. I killed those guys.”

“The way Cap tells it, you weren’t given much choice.”

Bucky huffs, eyes darting around to locate his shoes.  “Doesn’t matter. Still my hands.”

“Yeah, I get that too.  Two faces of the same coin? Uncontrollable alter ego?  Trust me, I know.” Banner sets the laptop aside and walks over toward Bucky, spreads his fingers in front of Bucky’s face before extending a hand to adjust one of the probes.  Bucky tenses. “Look, Cap is handling it. He’s got Nat and Sam with him. You should probably lie back down.”

“And he’s got you babysitting me?”

“I was in D.C. for an Indigo Girls concert.”  Banner shrugs. “You like the Indigo Girls?” Bucky furrows his brow and Banner’s mouth makes and O shape _,_ and says, “Forgot about the whole..uh, missing time thing.  Well, either Steve is still operating under the delusion that I’m a medical doctor, or he knows the safest place you can be right now is in a room with the one superperson Hydra _doesn’t_ want to play with.  Aside from Thor, I guess.  But he’s, you know, _wherever,_ god-stuff _._ ”  Banner pauses.  “I mean, just don’t.. do anything crazy, I guess. I’m really trying to finish this whole project I’ve been working on, and..”  he waves a hand toward the screen of the laptop, and seems so calm and indifferent to it all. It’s relieving, in a way.

And at least there’s a little comfort in the fact that if Bucky loses it again, he’ll run right into a gigantic green fist, and he won’t have to worry about any of it anymore.

“Can I leave?”

Banner walks back to the chair and sets his laptop back over his knees.  “Come on man, that’d be rude. At least wait until Steve gets back.” He starts typing.  “Look, we don’t know each other really. I try to only get involved in like… End of the World drama, so whatever you two have going on, it’s not really my business.  And Steve looks like a kicked puppy when people disappoint him. Ahhhh, I’m--I’m just not into having that turned on me tonight, y’know. I have enough on my conscience.   _Oh,”_ Banner reaches over to a bag and starts rooting around.  “You mind if I get some blood samples?”

“For what?” Bucky asks.

“Told Cap I’d run a few panels.  Hydra is big on non-sanctioned chemicals.  See if anything is happening there that shouldn’t.”

“Thought you weren’t a medical doctor.”

“Doesn’t mean I don’t know stuff.”  He almost drops the handful of vials and grimaces.  “You mind?”

“Sure,” Bucky says, blinks and sits down.

 

\---

 

When he wakes up again Steve is sitting in the chair Banner was in earlier.  He’s dragged it toward the edge of the bed, elbows resting on the mattress, his nose buried in a book.   _A Room of One’s Own,_ is printed across the paperback front in bold white letters.

Bucky rolls on his side, examines Steve’s face.  No cuts or bruises. Not even ones leftover across his throat from Bucky’s hand.

“Hey,” Steve says looking up, and smiles.  “How do you feel?”

Bucky manages a wry smile.  “Not homicidal, if that’s what you’re asking. But it’s early and I haven’t had coffee yet so there’s still time.”

“Well, it’s the middle of the night, maybe that part can wait until morning, then.”  Steve closes his book and sets it aside, expression turning more serious. “I found something, back in Glasgow.  Those guys that tracked you down had something with them. I was going to destroy it myself, but..” he grabs something off the floor and sets it on top of the bed.

Bucky automatically starts scrambling away the moment he catches that shade of deep crimson red.

“Woah!”  Steve says and immediately removes it from sight.  “Sorry, sorry, I didn’t meant to… I know what this is Bucky.  Nat snapped it shut the second she realized what we had. Said no one can know the words in here.  Not even me.”

“Why did you bring it here?”  Bucky asks, looking at it like a person might would look at the timer countdown on a nuclear bomb.

“I thought you might want to destroy it yourself,” Steve says, “thought maybe it’d bring you some closure, even if was just a little.”  He rubs the back of his neck when Bucky keeps staring. “Yeah, that was stupid, I’ll just--”

Bucky reaches out, grabs Steve by the cuff of his arm sleeve.  Steve looks down to to Bucky’s hand and swallows. “You got a lighter?”  Bucky asks.

Steve smiles, a small lopsided curve to his lips, “I’ve got a whole fireplace.”

 

Within minutes they’re standing in front of it, watching flames lick over logs.  Steve holds the book out to Bucky, the firelight turning his blue-skinned Irish complexion into something warm and golden.  Bucky’s fingers slip over his when he takes the book and Steve twitches, then nods at Bucky when his hands are empty.

It’s unceremonious.  Bucky wouldn’t know what to say, even if his throat wasn’t clogged with the roughness lodged there.

He tosses the book into the fire, and at first nothing happens, but then the cover begins curling up at the edges.  The worn pages turn black and flake awake into cinders until there’s nothing left. Nothing at all.

 

\---

 

“Stay for a little while,” Steve asks over 3 a.m. coffee.  “Please.”

 

And because Bucky is weak and selfish, he says, “Okay,” and watches steam wisp against Steve’s lips.

 

\--

 

Bucky sleeps a lot, and Steve seems worried about it at first, but Bucky is so tired.  He sleeps almost an entire week. The need to rest subverts all else, even hunger is secondary, Bucky hardly feels the pangs in his stomach.  It’s like his body has been waiting to be in this exact position, guarded by Steve and surrounded by his presence, before letting go. He only gets up to use the restroom, to wash up, Steve forces him to eat after the first 72 hours of this.  Stops him as he tries to sneak back into the guest room and drags Bucky to the table, sits him down.

“You’re about to eat all of this,” Steve tells him, an order not a suggestion, and gestures to a spread of food:  A plate of spaghetti, a bowl of oatmeal with raisins and walnuts, a steak and potato, half a cheesecake.

Bucky rolls his eyes and lets his arm flop palm up on the table.  He thumps the pit of his elbow where you’d start and I.V. line, and looks flat faced up at Steve.

“Real funny, jerk,” Steve says and shoves a fork in Bucky’s hand and laughs when Bucky starts mumbling horrible things about Steve under his breath in Russian.  

It’s almost like cryo, he hardly even dreams.  He can barely remember a time where he wasn’t tired.  When he was erratic, Hydra would sometimes use sleep deprivation to lull him into complacency.  At full strength, Bucky can stay awake for nine days before suffering cognitive impairments. He can stay awake 19 days before total collapse.  While on the run, Bucky would go those full nine days, paranoia and nightmares keeping him from laying his head down, and even then he’d only sleep for six or seven hours at a time.  Enough to get up and do it all over again.

He hears Steve talking to Banner outside the door.

“Look, this is normal even for the average person.  After trauma, sometimes people sleep a lot. Helps heal the mind, and this guy… He’s got a lot of healing to do.  The serum is gonna do most of the physical recup for him, but there are things even _that_ can’t fix.  He needs a therapist, not a physicist.  Tony knows all the best ones, maybe you should--”

“What about his bloodwork?”

“Looks like he was on some pretty hardcore behavioral suppressants, they uh… they really did a number on him, there’s still traces of it in his blood.”

“How do we fix that?”

“Rest and regular meals will do the trick more than anything.  He has a vitamin D deficiency, which is _definitely_ irregular considering the serum’s vitamin composition.  He must not go out a lot.”

“He’s been on the run. I don’t think he’s had time for walks on the beach.”

“Well, he needs to make time. Guy is pumped full of cortisol, fight or flight response constantly activated.  If that were me, well.. I wouldn’t be me, would I? You’d be trying to use the _other_ guy like your GP.  But seriously. Little sun wouldn’t hurt.”

“And the EEG?”

“Yeaahhhh, that’s the one I’d be more concerned about.  There’s some irregularities, the same ones you tend to see in people who are in constant pain.”

“He’s in _pain?”_

Bucky pulls the pillow over his head and blocks out the sound.

 

\---

 

“You aren’t going to like this,” Steve says, and Bucky waits. “I think we really need to get you looked at by a doctor  Get your arm scanned, all of it.”

“Not safe.”

“I know how this is about to sound, but… I have connections.  I know trustworthy people.”

Bucky looks at the ground.  “How do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Trust people.”  Bucky says. “How do know they’re using you for the right things?  You’re special. There’s always going to be someone who wants to take advantage of that.  How do you _know?”_

Steve shakes his head, he reaches toward Bucky, then lets his fingers curl and fall away.

“Because I know good when I feel it, I always have.   _You_ used to know.”

“Guess they took that from me, too.”  Bucky murmurs. “Hard to tell the difference anymore.   Maybe it’s me that’s all wrong.”

“Bucky, you aren’t--”

“I am. I know I am.  But I know you aren’t.  I know you’re good all the way through, and I don’t trust much of anything anymore, but I trust that.”

“I’m not all that good,” Steve says, eyes travelling across Bucky’s face, and he turns away.

 

\---

 

“You’re crazy for bringing me here, I hope you know that,” Bucky mutters for the third time, gaze cutting a path up and down the street lined with vendors.

“It’s a _farmer’s market,”_ Steve says, “you think coverts ops would make a move between the goat soap and hydroponic lettuce?”

“First off, I don’t what hydroponic lettuce _is,_ and second, Hydra tried to bring about a new world order in the middle of daylight from a giant helicarrier _over the U.S. capital._ ”

Steve considers it a moment, mouth pulling to one side in reluctant agreement.  “Okay, you got me there,” Steve says, “I’m not saying we don’t be vigilant, but Bucky… you deserve a little freedom. No, don’t give me that look-- you do.  Don’t argue, it’s Sunday. Besides, there’s a cafe near the park that serves lox today and I swear the bagels taste like the ones your mama used to make.”

“All right,” Bucky says, because Steve is using that tone of voice, sort of bossy and whiny at the same time and it warms Bucky up right through the middle.

Steve picks up a few things as they pass through; a basket of golden apples, russet potatoes, a bunch of rainbow colored carrots that Bucky thinks Steve chooses because they look pretty sitting there.  A mason jar with fig preserves, and a loaf of challah. He gets recognized more than once and Bucky creeps far enough out of reach that it won’t look like they’re together. Steve thanks his admirers and offers a handshake, blushing to the tips of his ears the whole time like he _still_ hasn’t gotten use to celebrity, hasn’t yet realized what he looks like in a mirror, and can’t understand their fascination with him.

They take the lox and bagels to Meridian Hill Park and Steve chooses a spot near the cascading fountain.  It’s not overly crowded, the sky had been overcast when they first started out, but the clouds have given way and the sun takes the early spring chill out of the air.  Behind them, the water trickles hypnotically, soothes away the tined edges of Bucky’s stress. They eat quietly, and Bucky is just so grateful to Steve for never making it feel like it’s strange that Bucky doesn’t speak much anymore.  He knows the old Bucky wasn’t this way, that version of himself made such easy use of words-- and if he ever found himself at a loss, he at least had a story or a joke to cover up the fact that he had nothing important to say. Steve was the quiet one, lived within himself and never felt the same need for idle chatter to fill in the void of awkward silence.

It makes Bucky happy that Steve doesn’t try and change himself to compensate for Bucky’s reticence.  The hush isn’t oppressive or expectant, it’s comfortable, familiar and safe, like a conversation within itself that passes between the lulls.

“Thank you for this,” Bucky says, looking at the ground as grief crashes back into him.  For a moment, he’d forgotten the weight of his wounds--both his own, and the ones his hands have dealt.  The sun beating down on him, the water passing lightly over rock, the whisper of wind pushing his hair into his eyes:  Buck felt normal. He didn’t know he still had the capacity to feel anything beyond the relentless crush of fear and guilt.

Steve smiles as if Bucky has just delivered the solution for world peace, then nudges against Bucky with his shoulder.  He passes Bucky a bottled water without Bucky asking for it, then balances his whole long frame over the concrete trestle they’re sat on, and lies on his back.  The top of Steve’s head brushes the outside of Bucky’s thigh. Steve sighs, and closes his eyes.

Bucky tries not to stare at him like that, really does try, but his gaze keep getting drawn back down. That patient intensity that Steve carries in the set of his mouth, between his brows, falls away.  He seems so content, blonde hair wisps against Bucky’s leg, and Bucky’s twitches with the effort that it takes not to throw off his gloves and skim his bare fingers through it. Steve has let it grow out a bit from the military length crop.  It’s become a little shaggy at the nape, bangs falling in his face so he’s always pushing it back. Drives Bucky up the wall. Somehow, Bucky knows what that hair feels like in his palm, clean and soft and the knowledge of it preoccupies Bucky’s thoughts.

There was another spring day like this, a long time ago, a lifetime ago.  They were just kids then, barely thirteen, and Bucky had talked Steve out of the house and away from his chores to come play in the park.  They shared a loaf of brown bread and butter, while Steve drew the light streaming between the branches of a dogwood tree, and Bucky chattered on and on.  After awhile Steve went down on his back, the way he is now, face tipped up to receive the sun, and Bucky looked at him then, too.

A smudge of charcoal dust shone under the hollow of Steve’s eye, and Bucky, without thinking, licked his thumb and went to smear it away.  Steve’s eyes flew open, but he didn’t move. His face was all trepidation, but he didn’t as much as twitch, and Bucky bit his own lip and had to force his hand away--scrubbed it over and over against the tops of his trousers, the touch lingering under his skin long after.

Bucky knew then, he thinks, that somewhere, he was playing with fire.

 

\---

 

“Are you asleep?”

Bucky props himself up on his elbows in bed, squints at Steve through the darkness.  “Something wrong?”

“No. Just can’t sleep.”

“Oh,” Bucky says, a little baffled by it, “me neither.”

Steve hesitates in the doorway and Bucky wonders what it is he’s waiting for, but then Steve is grabbing one of the extra pillows off the floor and walking over to the bed.

“Shove over,” he says, and Bucky doesn’t even think about it.  He makes room for Steve, and Steve peels back the sheets and slips in beside him.  He squirms around for a moment, trying to get comfortable, then his foot collides with Bucky’s calf and Steve finally goes still on his side.  His hands tuck up under the pillow and they stare at each other a moment, both at a loss over this thing Steve has done.

“Is this weird?”

Bucky laughs quietly.  “A lot of things are weird these days.”  He turns on his side and faces Steve, pulls the sheets up until both their heads are covered.  “We’ve done this before,” he says with certainty.

“I know.”

“You’d get cold real easy.”

“I had bad circulation and weighed 95 pounds soaking wet.”

“But it was always me coming to get in bed next to you.  You’d sit there and shiver all night instead of just sayin’ so.”  Bucky can see Steve scratch a hand through his hair, a small movement that makes the sheets shift and catch.  “Why was that?”

“Didn’t know how to ask.”

And that seems right.  Bucky would have given Steve anything, all he had to do was ask, and Steve knew it, but Steve had a hard time differentiating between tenderness and charity.  Now all he asks of Bucky is that he stay. Wants the one thing from Bucky that can’t be promised.

Steve lifts a hand, fingers slowly straining toward Bucky’s shoulder.  “Can I?”

Bucky closes his eyes and nods.

It’s a ghost of a touch, Bucky can hardly feel the brush of a fingertip, but it makes something precarious within him sit up and take notice.  Steve traces the seam of metal to flesh, the raised grain of scar tissue roping outward onto Bucky’s chest, the grooves separating metal plates.  Steve is real careful about touching Bucky. Bucky tenses every time he feels even the impression of warmth against his skin, he’s forgotten how to be touched-- how to react without overreacting.  When it gets to be too much, Bucky presses Steve’s hand away and back down onto the mattress-- lets his palm rest over the top of Steve’s knuckles.

“Does it hurt?” Steve whispers.

 _Everything hurts,_ Bucky wants to say; everything that’s been done, how he can’t take any of it back, the wrecked fragments of his mind, and the division between their bodies-- everything has its own bitter sting.

“Yeah,” Bucky says, and tries not to think about the way Steve turns his hand back over, interlaces their fingers, and dips his forehead to rest against a metal wrist.  

 

\---

 

Bucky wakes to his arm dying beneath the weight of Steve’s head, he can’t feel his fingertips and it prickles with numbness.  It’s a strange juxtaposition to his other hand, one that isn’t even flesh and bone, but has more feeling in this moment. Steve is tucked up in the concave of Bucky’s body and Bucky’s nose is up against the top notches of his spine.  His breaths are gentle and even. Morning streams in through the cracks in the blinds, moulds itself over Steve in long, brilliant strips of light. He seems so at peace like this, and Bucky doesn’t mean to, but his other hand grazes over Steve’s hip.  The pressure sensors there are capable of picking up the texture of those itty bitty briefs he likes to wear, the slender ridge of his iliac crest.

Abruptly, Bucky realizes that touching Steve is making him hard.  Or maybe that’s just the rush of blood that comes with the morning.  It’s not something Bucky has any control over, hasn’t had in awhile, everything in head has been such a damn mess that he’s only thought of arousal in the objective sense.  Lately it’s just been an involuntary thing that happens in his sleep, to which Bucky wakes up with sticky drawers and no recollection as to how it happened. Hasn’t even taken a hand to himself since god knows when, mostly because his body still didn’t feel like _his,_ not really.  There’s a disconnect between his head and his skin.  But right now there’s a low, warm type of wanting, something that resonates just beyond Bucky’s reach.  Something that dawns slowly in his blood even as Bucky’s head is still clearing out the thickness of sleep.  He should move away, get up and leave Steve to the rest of his dreams, but Steve’s shape burns into him. Holds Bucky in place.  

Steve pushes back against Bucky in a stretch, hips rounding in such a way that his ass brushes up against where Bucky is half-hard against the back of his thigh.  He snuffles down against Bucky’s shoulder. Always such a hard sleeper.

 _Swear you could sleep through a bomb going off.  Wake up princess, we’re going fishing at the pier.  I’m sick of canned ham._ **_It ain’t even light out yet, Buck. Ten more minutes._ ** _Five, and you’re taking your toast to go._

“Steve,” Bucky mutters into the nape of Steve’s neck.  “You really should wake--” Bucky’s words choke off, he bites his lip when Steve stretches again, this time in such a way that the clothed head of Bucky’s dick ends up wedged between his warm thighs, and _fuck--_ Bucky whimpers.  His hand clutches convulsively into the material of Steve’s briefs

He feels the moment Steve wakes up, feels that entire roll into consciousness, the sudden stillness of his respiration.  The looseness in his spine where it’s pressed into Bucky’s chest becomes alert. “Bucky?” Steve asks, voice small and rough all at once.  He shifts back again, like he’s unsure of what it is he’s feeling. The movement causes the fabric of Bucky’s boxers to ruck up in such a way that his cock slips through the gaping fly, and leaves him aching and bare between Steve’s thighs.  And Steve, _Steve,_ he just _exhales_ shaky as fuck, his hips twitch--and that’s it.  Just that. Just the heat of him, and the barest hint of friction, and his breath stuttering all the way out of his lungs-- Bucky’s body seizes up.  His fingers clench over Steve’s upper thigh, other hand still numb from lack of circulation--it can’t do shit but lie there like the rest of him. Blindly, Bucky bites down against Steve’s shoulder as an orgasm is viciously yanked from his body.  He barely even _feels_ it, aside from the sudden tip over--like closing your eyes and falling blind, falling from a freight car into thin air with nothing but a jagged death below, and then it’s over.  

“God, I’m sorry.   _Shit,_ that’s not good,” Bucky says harshly, wincing at the red bite mark on Steve’s shoulder, and groaning miserably when he feels the slick mess he’s made of Steve’s thighs.  He scrambles to pull away, “I’m not used to--I didn’t mean to--”

But Steve’s hand is fumbling backward, grabbing Bucky by the hip the same way Bucky had him.  “It’s normal,” Steve says in a rush, “it’s normal, it’s okay I--- it’s normal.”

“I _know_ it’s normal,” Bucky bites out, jerking away and sitting up on the edge of the bed, looks back at Steve and jabs his fore and middle finger against his temple.  “I’m an amnesiac, not a kindergartner. I know what a fucking _orgasm_ is.”  Steve’s expression shutters immediately, his ears and cheeks are pink and Bucky’s stomach sinks down to the balls of his feet.  “Shit.. _Shit_ , Steve. I’m sorry. I don’t know why that happened. I’m just...”  Bucky puts his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, shivers a little at the wetness and the sudden chill after the rapid loss of Steve’s body heat.  His boxers stick to the inside of his thigh.

“It’s alright,” Steve says gently, “you don’t gotta be.. embarrassed or.. Bruce said your body chemistry might be going through some changes now that you’re beginning to heal properly.  To include stuff like…” he can practically hear Steve blushing as he says it, “libido.”

Bucky turns to roll his eyes at Steve because he _sincerely_ does not need this fucked up version of the puberty talk, but his gaze catches where Steve has the covers bunched up over his hips and Bucky’s mind rapidly deviates into wondering if he were to pull away the sheets---

 

\---

 

Steve has to leave sometimes, he has meetings and training sessions, the occasional mission that Bucky spends trying to distract himself from worry.  He begins to venture out on his own, never too far from from the apartment, down to the little kosher deli on L street. Bucky doesn’t tell the guy who works the register his name ever, but he always seems pleased that Bucky shows up with some regularity and knows his order by heart.  Sometimes Sam stops by and drags Bucky out for a run. Bucky can hoof it over 70 mph when he’s pressed, could lap Sam over and over if he wanted to. But it’s also nice to match their speed and listen to Sam’s music on the little bluetooth speaker he hooks into the band of his jogging pants.  

It’s nice to run and not feel chased.  

Sam stops to breathe, slides down until he’s propped up against the trunk of a tree.  He complains about how unfair it is that Bucky isn’t even winded, and Bucky tosses a water bottle from his backpack.  Sam snags it out of the air, drinks, and sets it aside.

“So,” he says, when the panting for oxygen has stopped, “how’s domestic life treating you?”

“As opposed to the domestic terrorism?” Bucky deadpans, and smiles when Sam lets his head swivel to the side to give him A Sam Look.  “I don’t know,” Bucky amends, and can’t add anything to it. He really doesn’t know, a part of him still feels so buried deep, overgrown with gnarled roots, and inaccessible.  He doesn’t know what to feel most of the time. “I still get confused a lot. You know that feeling when you lose something and can’t remember where you’ve put it down?” Sam nods.  “That, but all the time. Don’t know what’s real, or what they put there, or if something is a memory or something I made up.”

“They imprisoned and tortured you, took your memories, took all the stuff that made you _you,_ and used your body to act out their will.  It’s gotta be hard to integrate all that.” Bucky clenches his jaw and looks away.  “I’m not saying you’ll wake up one morning and be okay, I know that’s not how this works.  You could have given up at any point, but you haven’t, and I think that means something.”

“Like what?”

“Means you want more from your life than just surviving it.”

Bucky sniffs and zips his backpack.  “And here I was thinking I was working out with an Avenger, but turns out he’s a damn therapist.”

“Hey, I never said _what_ we were working out.  Could be your glutes, _could_ be your deepest darkest secrets-- you never know with me!  Gotta be on that mental health grind, leg day can wait. And between us?  The Avengers are just a bunch of turbo powered functional basket cases with good intentions.” He pauses and seems to re-consider this, then says, “Except for Thor, actually.  Considering that whole family dynamic, it’s amazing the dude is pretty well-adjusted.” His eyes glaze over a bit and Bucky wonders if this is just the natural reaction of the average person after meeting a benevolent demigod, because he’s seen Steve and Natasha and Banner share that same dazed look.

Bucky coughs and Sam refocuses.  “Anyways, what I mean, is you sort of fit the profile.  Dark and broody is sort of par for the course round’ here.  If you ever, you know, decide to get back out there. I’ve been watching Steve’s ass for over a year now, and that’s a lot of ass to watch.”  He pauses when Bucky’s eyes go narrow and sharp. “I realize now that came out the wrong way. But you know what I mean. I’m just saying that you need to reframe your idea of yourself.  Don’t think of yourself as a weapon. You’re a person, just like me. _You_ get to choose who you want to be.”

“Hey uh, Mr. _Falcon,_ sir, quick question:  You do this shit to Steve?” Bucky asks, catching the water bottle when Sam throws it back.  And he likes this, even though he won’t admit it, it’s a relief that he doesn’t have to tiptoe around Sam. There’s such an underlying intensity in his day-to-day with Steve, sometimes it just feels good to be around someone he has no history with _._ Sam is all good-natured ribbing, and idle conversation, is so busy radiating positivity like a goddamn beacon, that he catches Bucky off-guard in his more poignant moments. 

Sam laughs, “At the beginning, yeah. He loved it about as much as you do.”  He takes a deep breath, hands over his head, and twists to one side then the other in a stretch.  “He’s gotten better since you turned up though.”

Bucky shakes his head.  “I make him sad.”

“I think he’s just worried about you.  That’s not the same as making someone sad.  When he came out of the ice, the world was crazy different, and everyone he knew was dead.”  Sam presses his lips together thoughtfully, and shrugs. “He thought he was alone.”

 

\---

 

 _This is a dream,_ Bucky tells himself over and over, it’s a dream. It has to be.  

There’s blood soaking him up to the wrist, a knife in his hand. And there’s Steve, wide-eyed with betrayal and shock, Bucky’s knife buried in his heart.  

“ _Steve,”_ Bucky gasps, “I--I--” and when he tries pull away, tear that knife out of Steve’s chest, his body doesn’t obey the order.  Instead, his other hand grasps Steve by the shoulder and jerks him forward, further onto the blade, and Steve cries out and doubles over.  His fingers dig into Bucky’s shirt, clinging to Bucky even now, trying to speak but all that comes out is a wet gurgling sound and the vague formation of Bucky’s name on his lips.

“I’m _sorry_ ,” Bucky says and feels the lump lodged in his throat give way to tears, “Oh _god_ , Steve I’m so sorry--”

But then he’s being pulled backward.  Steve falls heavy to ground, he stares at nothing, he does not blink because he doesn’t see, the bright blue focus in his eyes is all burned out and left behind a husk that wears Steve’s face but lacks _him._ Bucky wants to go down beside him, lie next to him and wait to die, but his body isn’t his own.

“Good work _Soldat,_ your mission is finally complete.”

He’s crying-- horrible sobs wrenched up from the blackest parts of him where everything is still raw and bleeding and poisonous.  They put him in the chair, pin him down, muzzle him to block out all the noise.

“Do not worry, _Soldat._ You will not remember this in time.  You won’t even know his name.”

Electricity overhead. The halo lowers.  The world goes dark. And Bucky _screams--_

_“Bucky…!”_

The earth is shaking and shaking and shaking.

Bucky jerks up with all his strength, hands reaching blindly forward and restricting the moment he feels himself grip around the column of a throat.  He’ll kill them all, every last Hydra agent left, and when he’s finished Bucky will put himself down. He should have done it to begin with, but Bucky is just so fucking selfish when it comes to Steve-- wanted so desperately to be near him and knew damn well how dangerous he was, and now Steve’s _dead,_ he’s _dead,_ and it’s Bucky’s _fault,_ and--

Fingers tear at Bucky’s iron grip, pulling at his wrist, his upper arm, and whomever trachea he’s trying to shatter is _strong,_ stronger than a regular human.  And the crackle of the memory wiper’s static has gone silent, and he isn’t where he thought he was and that… that’s not right, that--

Bucky blinks away some of the bleariness, reality asserts itself over the fabric of the dream, and that’s not some nameless faceless person Bucky is choking to death.  It’s Steve.

His eyes are going hazy and bloodshot, mouth working to speak and get the breath with which to do so, and Bucky looks down impersonally at the metal hand wrapped around Steve’s throat, before gasping raggedly and wrenching it away.

Steve immediately falls forward onto the bed, coughing and sputtering, and Bucky scrambles to remove himself from proximity.  He plasters himself against a wall, hands grabbing fistfulls of his own hair, and he’s hyperventilating.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m--,” the words tumble and repeat themselves and Bucky can’t look at Steve as he rubs his throat and tries moving toward Bucky.  

“It’s okay,” Steve rasps, voice nothing but gravel, and Bucky’s heart lurches at the sound of it.  “Bucky calm down, I’m okay!” He goes on his knees and gets level with Bucky, “Take a deep breath, come on,” he says, and Bucky could scream for how not _right_ it is that Steve is over here trying to comfort Bucky, even though he’s the one that almost ended up with a crushed windpipe.  “Deep breath,” Steve says and demonstrates, a long inhale that catches and sounds sore, a shaky exhale.

 _C’mon Stevie, deep breaths.  In…..and out. In….and out. You gotta breathe for me, pal.  I know it hurts…_ **_Buck I--_ ** _No, don’t talk, just breathe.  Your ma will be back with your medicine any minute.  In...and out. In… and out. Look at me. We’re okay.  You’re gonna be okay._

“I killed you,” Bucky says when he can talk again.  “I.. I did, It was so real, I--”

Steve shakes his head, says, “No,” real firm about it, “it was a nightmare.  I have them too.”

“But I tried to--”

 _“Don’t,”_ Steve says and grabs Bucky’s metal hand and won’t let go even though Bucky tries yanking it away, he presses it low against his own throat.  “You wouldn’t hurt me. See?”

Bucky stares at his hand on Steve, Steve’s hand over his, the stark contrast of fair skin to steel.  “You have to be tired of this.”

“Of what?”

“Me,” Bucky says, “all of this.”  The meandering dark slur Bucky’s presence has brought into his life, he means.  The disorder, the constant vigilance. Living with the echo of Bucky Barnes, and struggling through the great muck of recovery, and Bucky feels like they’re mourning that man together, except Steve just won’t _admit_ it.

Steve only rubs a circle over Bucky’s knuckles and says, “I’ll tell you if I’ve had enough.”

 

\---

 

Steve is on alert the following morning, eyes carefully tracking Bucky around the apartment for any signs that he might be considering making a run for it.  He schedules plans for tomorrow and makes sure Bucky sits down and goes through it all with him, appeals to Bucky’s sense of obligation. He keeps leaning into Bucky’s space and Bucky has to remove himself from Steve’s warmth because it does funny things to his head, makes it hard to think the right things.  Steve’s been so careful about touching Bucky, almost always asks before he reaches out, like he’s afraid these little stolen gestures might run Bucky right back out the door. And maybe he’s right, but he’s probably right about it for the wrong reasons. He must think Bucky hates it because of all the flinching, the shying away, but Bucky burns when Steve’s hands are on him.

Bucky gets up to put their dishes in the sink when Steve’s elbow brushes his, and Steve folds his hands on top of the table and stares at them a moment before getting up and gathering close to Bucky’s shoulder.  

“We’re in this together, you understand that right?” he says. “I wouldn't have it any other way, Bucky.”

Bucky pauses and turns to look at Steve, is sure to wear a warm smile and nod _just so_ that it seems agreeable and authentic.  “I know.”

“Good,” Steve says, and brushes his fingertips against the small of Bucky’s back.

\---

 

It’s another 24 hours before Bucky makes his move.  Steve was smart to stay up, but he’s finally succumbed to sleep-- passed out reading a literal 12th grade history book on Economics because there’s still decades left to catch with.  He tries so hard to understand the world he’s been thrust into, seems even more baffled and confused by it than Bucky himself, at times. Of course, Bucky had been taken out of cryo throughout the years, made to perfect certain modern skills in order to adapt to the needs of a mission, but for Steve-- it’s only been a few years since 1945.

The textbook rests open, facedown on his chest, and Steve twitches and mumbles in his sleep.  It must not be a good dream, because he flinches occasionally, the furrow between his brows appears and it’s all Bucky can do not to press him thumb there and soothe it away.

Bucky moves soundlessly through the apartment.  He doesn’t nick any of Steve’s things this time, he’s already taken so much.  He keeps the clothes on his back, the old satchel of Bucky’s Steve retrieved from that bunker in West Virginia, holding his knives and tech and a handful of hook explosives for emergencies.  He doesn’t allow himself to look at Steve again, because if he starts he might lose all his resolve. This is the right thing, Bucky keeps telling himself, he knows how to run and hide, all Bucky needs is a head start, and Steve won’t understand now… but maybe he will one day.

 

“Not even going to tell me goodbye?”  Bucky freezes near the door, slowly turns and sees Steve standing two feet behind him.  Arms across his chest. Head cocked to one side. Lips pursed. Mad enough to spit. “Guess not.”

“Didn’t want to make a scene,” Bucky says, and that’s not really true, he just didn’t want to see that look in Steve’s eyes.

“How can you leave when you know what it’s like being apart?”

“I don’t know anything,” Bucky lies, again.   

“You do.  Maybe not everything, not all of it, but you _feel_ it.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to _me._ You--”

“God Stevie, don’t you _get_ it?” Bucky hisses, “It _hurts_ to be near you.  It hurts to have you stand there and look at me, when the Bucky you knew is _gone._  I’m the thing that took his place, and the person you knew ain’t never coming back.  You’re chasing after a ghost, and you’re only gonna get yourself hurt, or worse. You don’t underst-- _fuck._ Look. The stuff they made me do, the people who made me do it-- it isn’t gonna matter if I had a say in it or not.  Someone is always gonna either want revenge, or they’re going to want to use me for the thing I was made for. It’s bad enough I gotta live with it, no one else is gonna suffer because of me.”

“Please don’t do this,” Steve says quietly, “I’m hurting too, Bucky,“ he gestures into the space between them, “ _this_ hurts me.”  And Bucky wonders if Steve means their conflict, or the leaving, or the simple distance between their bodies, keeping them apart.  Maybe he means all of it.

“I’m not worth all this. Maybe I was, once, I don’t know, but--” Bucky peters off into silence, can’t meet Steve’s gaze.  “I couldn’t be good then, but I can right now. Let me be good.”

It’s so many words, he isn’t used to saying so much, they tumble off his tongue, taste all raw and metallic and take up so much space.

“It can’t be the right thing if it means we’re not together,” Steve says and sets his jaw.  “Until the end. _You_ said that.”

Bucky lets out some incredulous laugh, hoarse and bitter.  “You think it’s _easy_ staying away from you?  Even after they took my own goddamn name, I remembered yours.  Had to look up my mother on Wikipedia though, can’t even remember what _she_ looked like--but I know your favorite candy was those god awful licorice wheels, and you stuffed those hand-me-down shoes I gave you with newspaper because they didn’t fit right, instead of telling me _Bucky these don’t fit right_ \-- and it’s like I’m watching it through someone else’s eyes! You’re stuck in my fucking _head,”_ Bucky stabs a metal finger against his skull and grits it through his teeth. Steve’s expression falters at this, and Bucky sees that wretched hope spark up across his face again, and Bucky can’t stand it.  Steve’s concern, his heel-dug-in belief that Bucky is something worth holding onto, it makes Bucky hope _too._ He remembers what it feels like to have that hope stamped out, and he can’t keep going through it.

“The best thing you can do,” Bucky says flatly, “is to let me go.”

Steve narrows his eyes, that righteous temper flaring again, flings his hand toward the door, “I’m not holding you hostage, the door is right there, Buck!”

Bucky doesn’t let himself think about it, turns tail and heads for the exit, but Steve is on him in an instant-- hands snatching into the collar of Bucky’s coat, spinning Bucky around, pushing him back and back and back until Bucky goes up against the wall with a bump.

Bucky crosses an arm over Steve’s hands, clasps Steve’s wrist in his metal palm, ready to spin him down to the floor, but Steve won’t budge even as Bucky lets his grip tighten.  “Get out of my way, Steve,” Bucky says, voice low with warning.

Steve shakes his head, “No I will _not_.  I can’t let you do this. You would have never have let me run out like this.”

“You don’t get a _say.”_ Bucky shoves harder, then again, he’s almost thrashing at this point, but Steve absorbs it all, even as Bucky yells at him, “You’re insane, you’re _nuts!”_

“Well that makes two of us,” Steve bites back, dodging an elbow.

“Let me go,” Bucky says, even toned at first, then louder, “Steve--” but Steve leans into it, keeps saying _no no no_ every time Bucky says _let me go,_ again and again, and Bucky just keeps getting louder, desperate and sad, and it isn’t _fair,_ none of it’s fair.  He digs his hands into the front of Steve’s shirt, the same way Steve has him, their wrists tangling, unsure if he’s pushing back or pulling in.  Both, perhaps, and Bucky finally yells, “ _Why won’t you let me go?!”_

 _“Because this is my life too!”_ Steve shouts back, eyes going red rimmed, glossy and watery. Bucky goes silent just like that, and Steve does too, his voice trembles when he speaks again.  “When are you going to understand that I don’t care that you’re different, I don’t care about any of it, and I don’t want you to be someone you aren’t. I just want…”

 _"What?”_ Bucky half-yells, because he’s _angry_ now, and he’s angry at Steve’s being angry.

Steve inhales, almost forms a word, but nothing comes out.  He blinks rapidly, breathing hard like he’s fought a war. His gaze flicks down to Bucky’s mouth, lingers there, and with no warning at all, the air constricts between them, takes on a different sort of tension that Bucky can’t quite grasp-- but feels scaldingly familiar and he has to _do something_ before the ache of it eats them both whole.  Steve must feel it too because the hard grip in the front of Bucky’s shirt loosens, and when Steve leans a little closer and licks his bottom lip, Bucky becomes abruptly aware of all the points of contact between their bodies.  

The brush of their stomachs with each heavy inhale.

Bucky’s knuckles against Steve’s bare collarbone.

Steve’s thigh slotted between Bucky’s legs.

The jut of their hip bones brushing together-- and _god_ , oh god, Bucky knows what this is now.

Bucky says, “Oh shit,” all breathless with epiphany, and yanks Steve in by the nape of his neck.

Their lips press together hard and dry, more surprise than anything, but then Steve _moans_ .  It’s the most incredible sound Bucky’s ever heard, all muffled and buzzing against Bucky’s lips-- helpless with yearning that’s gone on too long.  Years of wanting so much and getting so, so, little. It cuts to the quick, and Bucky wants to tell him _I know this feeling, I know I know I know_.  It’s buried inextricably deep, scored into his bones, and burns brighter than the ambivalence and anger and guilt that took up a place at the middle of Bucky.  This predates it all.

He chases that moan back into Steve’s mouth, and Steve opens to him without hesitation. Within a second the shock gives way to this intense _need._ It breaks down all of Bucky’s resolve the instant Steve melts into this kiss, like it’s all he’s ever wanted to do, and now that he has it, he never intends on coming back up for air.

Bucky’s teeth dig into Steve’s bottom lip, the tips of their tongues slide together and it’s deep and frantic, Bucky’s hands bracket over Steve’s ears, his thumb pushes over an eyebrow, and Steve’s fingers still haven’t left the front of Bucky’s shirt.  Perhaps he’s forgotten how to let go. Even here, even in this, they move flawlessly together, and Bucky finds comfort in the fact. Just like when they lived together, fought together, the constant awareness of the other’s body leading them into the next motion.  Their angles change, one pushing forward and the other leaning back, and Bucky’s entire body jolts with it.

“Did I make this up,” Bucky asks hoarsely, all five fingers shake when he moves to brush some of the wetness off Steve’s cheek, and that familiarly sharpens at once.  “Have we done this before. I remember--”

“Mmhm _mmf_ yeah, once, just once, I-- _”_ Steve mutters, and pants against Bucky’s lips when Bucky surges up against him, switches their positions and gets Steve pinned to the wall a couple feet over from where they started. He’s trying to move them in some sort of direction, get Steve lying down somewhere soft, but the lines of demarcation between them becomes more insufferable with every scant inch.  

How could he have forgotten this?  How did he ever bear being separated afterward?  Bucky would have better luck casting off another limb.

A seam gives on Steve’s shirt where Bucky’s hands grope and seize over Steve’s chest and shoulders.  Steve rears back and pulls it off and-- _fuck_ Bucky thinks.

“You look real good _,”_ Bucky says helplessly, and Steve’s cheeks go red hot and that’s even better.

“So do you, Buck,” Steve says back.

“No, listen, you’re so-- you really--” and _beautiful_ comes to mind, and so does _unbelievable,_ but then Steve’s fingers are sliding around the hem of Bucky’s t-shirt, brushing the bare skin around his hips, and whatever he was going to say breaks off into a sharp hiss. Steve tugs indecisively, and Bucky can’t really blame him for that, they were in such a different confrontation a minute ago and Steve must be still be painfully aware of the whiplash of emotion between the two.  Bucky peels his hands away from Steve long enough to get ahold of the back of his collar and Steve yanks it off the rest of the way, sends it flying into a corner somewhere, and then they’re pressed together. He can feel Steve’s heart hammering away, mirrored by by Bucky’s own, and Steve is warmer than anything Bucky’s ever known.

“ _Jesus,_ ” Bucky gasps, voice gone shrill and totally unfamiliar.  He finds Steve’s mouth again, tries to talk and kiss him at the same time.  “M’ sorry I yelled, I’m sorry, my head just gets so-- I didn’t mean to make you upset.”  

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Steve whispers, hips pushing up against Bucky in little shaky thrusts that he can’t seem to help.  “It’s my fault. I never know if I’m helping or suffocating you, and then I get near you and all I can think about is--” he kisses Bucky so hard their teeth click, his hands find their way into Bucky’s hair, stroking and scratching along his scalp and making Bucky shiver all over.

Steve’s back drags along the wall as they try moving toward the bedroom, their fingers tangle, slip against buttons and flies and zips.  Steve’s wrist brushes over the hardness underneath Bucky’s briefs, and he almost doubles over. He isn’t sure what he expected, Hydra medicated him up to the tits to prevent this exact scenario.  Numbed him up so the pain couldn’t reach deep, and they made sure nothing else would either. After the meds had worn off, the great mess of trauma still kept its own stranglehold on Bucky’s dick in the waking hours, and anything suppressed or pent up spent itself in his sleep.  More than once he’s guiltily stuffed his spoiled sheets in Steve’s washer. And then there was that one mortifying event in Steve’s bed, but other than that...

He’s spent so much time dissociated from his own body, hating it for what it’s done, it’s startling to be touched like this.  Everywhere Steve is pressed against him ignites with sensation, and his skin is _sensitive_ , it’s a part of him, and amplified by the effects of the serum it’s like touching live wires together-- but without all the pain.  It’s been so long since someone has had their hands on him like this, touched Bucky for some other reason than to beat the life out of him. He’d forgotten what it’s like to be a thing that feels and needs and wants.

Bucky trips on his own goddamn pants leg when Steve starts shoving down his jeans.  

“Stevie-- _Steve,”_ Bucky says, just because it’s a relief to have Steve’s name in his mouth. They finally make their way through the open door into the room, and Steve topples them backward onto his bed.  His mouth is kiss bruised and there are little red splotches all over his throat and jaw where Bucky’s stubble has rubbed the skin raw, and Bucky burns for him.

“Oh god, you have to tell me,” Steve says, voice unsteady as he flips their positions and begins kissing a path down Bucky’s chest, “you have to tell me if you want me to stop.”

“Please don’t stop,” Bucky says right away.  He _wants_ something, it isn’t the oppressive haze that he constantly is trying to feel his way through, or memories that crumble to bits the instant Bucky tries to bring them into focus.  This choice is clear because it was made a long time ago.

“I won’t,” Steve promises, rubs his lips once over the ridge of a hip bone, and hooks his fingers into the band of Bucky’s briefs, begins pulling them down.  Bucky chokes on air when he feels Steve’s cheek rubbing up the side of his cock, smearing a kiss on the inside of his thigh.

“Bucky, is this okay?” Steve asks, such a fucking gentleman, even like this, and Bucky groans and buries his hands in Steve’s soft hair.

Steve doesn’t start slow, just lets all his breath rush out in one exhale and swallows Bucky’s dick like he’s been thinking about it forever, and starts sucking.  Bucky’s spine arches off the bed and he’s pulling up at Steve’s hair to keep from choking him, and Bucky gasps, “Holy _shit,_ Steve you--” but Steve only stops to pull one of Bucky’s legs between his own, and _yes, this,_ he can feel Steve hard and rutting against him.  It grounds Bucky, reminds him that they’re in this together, and it’s not just him coming apart at the seams-- it’s Steve too.  Steve wants this too.

Bucky’s world narrows down to the heat of Steve’s mouth slipping against him, wet and messy and perfect.  One of Steve’s hands is wrapped around the base of his cock, his other hand has a death grip over the outside of Bucky’s thigh, and it takes all of 30 seconds and the absolute miracle of Steve moaning around him and coming first, that propels Bucky over the edge.  

For a moment he isn’t sure if he remembers how to bridge that gap between tension and ecstasy, been decades since it was a deliberate, intentional thing, but Steve refusing to pull off even as his briefs grow wet and sticky against Bucky’s shin--even as he whimpers and grinds down and licks weakly over the head, and yeah that’s definitely a little scrape of tooth, but it’s all perfect.  He knows he needs to give some sort of warning, intuitively understands that’s the polite thing to do, but all Bucky manages is a few frantic taps on top of Steve’s head, before he gives himself over to the searing release of pressure that’s been building inside of him the moment Steve looked down at his mouth. God, it verges on something pain-adjacent, almost not even a _relief,_ and Bucky cries out hoarsely, blood pounding in his ears, arches and comes in Steve’s mouth.  

It takes several moments for him to pull around, isn’t even sure whether or not he choked Steve, or if Steve discreetly spat into a handkerchief produced from god knows where.  He feels Steve’s forehead resting against the crease of his thigh, and he’s letting out hot puffs of damp air against Bucky’s skin.

“C’mere,” Bucky murmurs, “get up here, you’re too far away,” and Steve doesn’t hesitate, climbs back up Bucky’s body, kicking off his spoilt underwear the whole way.  His cheeks are flushed to the tips of his ears, mouth swollen, still shiny-wet, and Bucky can’t kiss him fast enough. Spins Steve down onto his back and lies down on top of him, smears their bodies together, really makes a damn mess of it just to feel the bareness of skin to skin.

“ _Again,_ ” Steve says, breathless and demanding.  “Again, Bucky you--” his hands run frenetic patterns across Bucky’s back and hips.  Steve is still hard and straining against him, and with some degree of surprise, Bucky is in a largely similar state.  Bucky fits his left hand around them, brings them into alignment, and raises a brow at Steve.

“We’re the same,” Steve says, uses it explain everything these days.  

“I don’t know what that means here, pal,” Bucky laughs nervously.

Steve’s hands push at Bucky’s hips, makes them move together.  “The serum,” he pants, eyes shutting and Bucky only catches the tail end of what he’s muttering,“--cardiovascular system.”  He pulls Bucky in for a kiss, murmurs against his lips, “Once is nothing.”

“Oh,” Bucky says, voice a little fragile thinking about all the ways Steve has come round to this discovery, a little jealous and turned on at the same time.  They slide up against one another, slow at first, then Steve is spreading his legs, gets his knees up around Bucky’s hips, and Bucky bites down hard on his lip when his dick slips low against Steve’s ass.

“ _Bucky_ ,” Steve murmurs, the flush across his face deepening and traveling down his chest, little capillaries bursting with blood and lighting up Steve’s fair skin. He tugs Bucky down in implication, rolls his hips and _fuck_ if Bucky were to as much as twitch, he’d probably be inside him.  “H-hold on,” Steve pants, reaching so fast over to his bedside table that his torso nearly blurs from the movement, he’s uncapping something, putting it in his hand, and then that hand is slick and tight around Bucky’s dick.  Bucky hisses for a second in betrayal, because that’s also _cold,_ but it warms up real quick as Steve coats him in it.  Gives one slow stroke from root to tip that makes Bucky shudder all over.  Steve’s free hand reaches up and tangles itself in Bucky’s hair, drawing him back down to kiss him deep.  Every couple seconds Steve stops kissing back, starts gasping instead, there’s a tense line between his brows like he’s concentrating.  Bucky can feel the muscles across the right side of Steve’s chest flexing rhythmically, and his other hand is still squirming down between his legs and--

 _“What?”_ Bucky chokes out when he realizes that Steve is stretching himself open.  “Fuck, Stevie,” he says again weakly, and reaches down, finds the spot with his own fingers and pushes one in alongside Steve’s.  “I woulda done that.”

“You would’ve taken too long,” Steve pants, eyes screwing shut when Bucky twists and brushes up against some sweet spot.  “I’ve already waited over seventy years. Next time you can. Whatever you want,” he promises, withdrawing his own fingers and reaching for Bucky.

“You really want this,” Bucky says, shaking his head and looking up to tether himself in Steve’s eyes, still can’t quite believe this is happening and his head isn’t rejecting it.

“You do too,” Steve says, confident enough for them both.  Steve is right, Bucky _does_ want to, it’s all Bucky can do to sustain the divide.  “Show me,” Steve whispers, pulling Bucky down and kissing his throat.  He cups the back of Bucky’s neck and presses their foreheads hard together.   “Show me, c’mon.”

Bucky can’t speak when he pushes in, but Steve manages to inhale sharply and lets out a little shaky _ah..!_ on the exhale.  It’s hard to tell if it’s a _good_ sound or a _pain_ sound, so Bucky errs on the side of caution and tries pulling back, but Steve starts shaking his head no, rolls his body against Bucky’s in a way that has nothing to do with hurting at all.

Bucky pushes his hips forward, everything is slick and tight, Steve is even hotter here if that’s possible  Once he’s breached the few inches, everything inside Bucky screams at him to thrust in the rest of the way--chase all that heat back to the source, crawl inside Steve as far as Steve will let him.  He’s going lightheaded, the corners of his vision sparking up at the edges.

“Breathe, Buck,” Steve reminds him, and finally Bucky takes a ragged gasping breath when he’s bottomed out.  This feels _almost_ familiar, more like a muscle memory than an actual memory-- he’s shed most of his recollections of sex.  Long-term memory discarded things in order of least importance, leaving Bucky with hazy thoughts, a couple faceless people, don’t know if they were men or women, and only kept that one night with Steve so long ago.

He pulls back, just a bit, just to try it, and pushes himself back in.  Does it again, further out this time, enough to catch at Steve’s rim, before slowly thrusting back inside.  His whole body practically vibrates with the effort to keep steady instead of capitulating to the tide of sensation. “I forgot-- I forgot how this feels.”

“Don’t hold back,” Steve murmurs, his breath a sultry thing gusting up against Bucky’s lips where their heads are still pressed together.  “I can take it. Let me.”

“Steve..” Bucky manages, before permission seeds itself at the root of his spine and has Bucky moving in earnest--cock retreating and returning, each time more powerful than the last. His head drops to Steve’s chest, and Bucky begins making sounds that are so unfamiliar that he hardly believes they’ve come from him at all.  Frantic and animalistic, guttural, and sounding so close to pain, but it isn’t pain, it isn’t at all. Steve echoes Bucky’s racket with his own low grunts, hitching gasps, vowels that fly off his tongue, warped and strained by pleasure. Bucky feels immediately possessive of those sounds-- those belong to _him,_ Bucky put those there.

Steve’s hand wanders up the nape of his neck, twining into the hair he finds there before yanking _._ Bucky’s lips pull back from his teeth in a wince and he twists his head, frees up Steve’s hands, and slams them down against the mattress. Steve gives him a small grin, cheeky, like it’s what he might have been angling for, and lets their fingers interlace. Bucky’s body, his damaged, untrustworthy, hated body-- holds Steve down.  Holds him there without violence, Bucky spans Steve, keeps him contained under the shelter of his body and Steve doesn’t let go of Bucky at all. He lets Bucky ground himself until the white-hot grief, hopelessly interlaced into every last molecule, begins to crash over him. Bucky is inside Steve and the aloneness, the constant terrible vacancy of it, can’t touch him here.

Bucky can feel Steve edging toward his own climax, can feel his dick getting harder, leaking where their bellies are pressed together because Bucky can’t bear to stray too far from Steve’s mouth.  It’s too difficult to tell who is making what sound anymore, it’s a shared escalation of needy whimpers and the slip of friction reaching critical mass--but somehow it’s still surprising when Steve gasps and breaks a hand away and begins jerking himself off.

Bucky bats him away at the wrist, wants to do that himself, and Steve doesn’t put up a fight over it, just groans loud and gorgeous, and leaks all over Bucky’s fingers.  “Come on,” Bucky tells him, “you’re so close.”

Steve manages a whine, both hands coming up to scrape down Bucky’s spine, grabs his ass and pulls him in and in and in.  His eyes squeeze shut, Steve’s breath ratchets high and he holds it, holds it. Bucky knows what he’s about to do, his fist moves faster, and Steve’s air leaves him in one great rush.  His eyes are flying open, big and shocked and electric blue, and he’s spurting in Bucky’s fist. He’s so fucking beautiful like this, completely life-ruining, that sad-edge gone out of him and left all the sweetness.

“Oh god,” Bucky says, because he can _feel_ that too, can feel Steve’s orgasm from the inside where his muscles contract around Bucky.  He flattens himself against Steve, arm hooking around his right leg and hiking it up higher.  Thrusts turn shallow and frantic, and Steve uses shaky hands to hold back Bucky’s hair in his fist, nuzzles up underneath Bucky’s jaw. Something on the bed frame splinters from the force of their bodies coming together, causes the bed to dip ominously to the side, but Bucky can’t be bothered with that right now.  His balance orients automatically, a low noise buzzes in his throat and he keeps fucking his way into Steve. It takes all of five seconds, Steve’s twitching aftershocks, and Steve’s breath ghosting over the shell of Bucky’s ear, before Bucky follows suit. He gives a little shout, pushes erratically with the first couple pulses, then buries himself deep into the hot clutch of Steve’s body to ride it out.  Coming this time is all relief, all pleasure, such a different sort of intensity from the first time and _god--_ Bucky wants him again.  As soon as Steve’s ready.  He’s still balls deep inside him, and Bucky’s already aching in all the Steve-shaped places he carries at the heart of him.

Eventually he does pull out, head tipping to the center of Steve’s chest and watching as he does it, everything feeling a bit surreal in the afterglow.  Steve rolls to the side, still mostly trapped underneath Bucky’s frame, but manages to snag a discarded bath towel from off the side of the bed. Bucky holds himself up long enough for Steve to give them each a cursory wipe down, then collapses again.  Metal arm and a leg still draped over him, Bucky rubs his thumb over Steve’s cheek, and Steve shuts his eyes, clasps one hand around Bucky’s forearm and fumbles around with the other until he can find a hip.

“I think we broke the bed,” Steve pants.

“I’ll fix it,” Bucky promises, albeit a little absently because he’s still reeling, still can’t believe he was inside Steve a minute ago.  “Does it always feel like that?” Bucky murmurs.

Steve smiles.  “Yeah, if you’re doing it right I suppose.  You technically have more experience than me, still.”

Bucky looks down between them at the work of art that is Steve Rogers, “Hard to believe.”  Literally Bucky can’t wrap his brain around it. Not that he’d expect Steve to be out there playing loose, Steve isn’t the type, but he can’t believe it’s not for lack of opportunity, or hell-- enthusiastic volunteers.

Steve shrugs and doesn’t quite look Bucky in the eye and says, “It’s always been you, Buck.”

Bucky’s heart stutters in his chest.  “But I was _dead,”_ he shakes his head, “dead and buried at the bottom of a ravine, for all you knew.  I wouldn’t have wanted you to be alone.”

“I know,” Steve says, “it didn’t matter. And then the SHIELD doctors tell me that short of getting killed, I’m looking at double or triple the lifespan of a regular human and I think.. probably have time to take it slow.  Wouldn’t be right to lead someone on, with my heart still set on you.”

Bucky has no idea what to say to that.

Instead he touches metal fingertips as carefully as he can over Steve’s jaw and kisses him slowly, the way he couldn’t do earlier because they were so desperate and eager for one another.  Bucky finds one faint bruise low on Steve’s throat, the shape of Bucky’s mouth. That’ll be gone soon enough, is only there because Bucky’s one of the few people strong enough to mark him up in any lasting way.  He can’t help but brush over it with a knuckle and feel a little smug.

“You really are something, you know that?” Bucky says.

Steve gets a sudden crook to his mouth, the one that always makes Bucky nervous because it usually precedes him saying something that’s gonna drive Bucky up a damn wall.

“Except there was that one Christmas party the first year out of the ice, and I was real down, and there was mistletoe and _Thor_ was there and I--”

Bucky has to kiss him hard to shut him up, still has Steve laughing and mumbling against his lips, so he bites warningly under the jaw and rubs a hand up between Steve’s legs and that’s got Steve gasping and twitching prettily again.  “Can you go again?” Bucky asks, presses the question into Steve’s skin. Steve responds with an _unhh,_ which Bucky takes as an affirmative since he’s already filling out in Bucky’ palm.  “Swear if I ever meet this guy…” Bucky threatens idly, climbing over Steve again and licks over the peak of a nipple.

“He’s a _god,_ Buck.”

Bucky licks again over his navel, tasting Steve’s skin and the bitterness of what he didn’t manage to clean away.  “Anyone can conduct lightening if they stand outside waving a hammer around long enough.” He blows over the saliva, dries it up, before continuing his downward path.

“Sure they can,” Steve says, real agreeable after Bucky’s fucked an orgasm or two out of him.  That’s knowledge worth having. “Oh _shit,_ Bucky,” he grates out when Bucky finally gets eye level with Steve’s cock and licks a long stripe from the base to the tip.  Rubs his lips over the smooth head before taking it into his mouth and sucking. Maybe he’s done this before, hard to tell, but Bucky likes it immediately--likes the weight of Steve in his mouth, loves how his jaw stretches to accommodate him, loves how it chases away the feeling of emptiness.  He especially loves looking up every few seconds and finding Steve’s eyes screwed shut, his mouth open, the white tips of his teeth exposed. They never did turn off the lights, and Steve’s body is one tense line of pleasure under Bucky’s hands, gorgeous and unashamed. Didn’t use to be that way, Bucky knows, he carried the visceral self-awareness of a person who grew up feeling trapped inside a body that gave no quarter.  Steve kept himself padded with layers of clothes, his relentless guardedness, and their combined self-denial.

It’s nothing to slip two fingers inside Steve, and he’s still so wet from what Bucky did to him, it makes something truly precarious echo all the way into the pulp of Bucky’s teeth.  Fuck, can’t be that selfishness that Bucky has over Steve, can it? That’s not good--he’ll have to watch that. But fuck it right now, because Bucky has to press around until he grazes over the spot that makes Steve writhe and beg, makes him scratch his fingernails over Bucky’s hair, over the mismatched landscape of his shoulders.  Three times in what, an hour? Bucky’s lost track of time, this isn’t sane, the hell kind of scientist _was_ Erskine anyways?  Shouldn’t be possible.  

Thank god it’s possible-- Bucky hasn’t felt the keen sting of lost time as much as he does right now and whatever spark of the old _him_ is left in the tatters of his psyche, it’s hell bent on making use of the time they’ve been given.  Such a rare thing, second chances.

He sucks Steve and twists his fingers into him like they might be ripped apart tomorrow, and for all either of them knows, they just might.  And when Steve says, “Buck, you’re gonna make me come,” all out of his head and vulnerable as hell, Bucky doubles down to make it happen. It does, Steve groans and gets big hanks of Bucky’s hair in his hands, pushes far enough against Bucky’s soft palate that he has to work to suppress the gagging reflex it triggers.  But it’s fine, it’s more’n fine, Bucky doesn’t mind one bit that his eyes water. They do that a lot these days, for far, far sadder reasons. And Steve is exerting his strength, physically lifting Bucky up by the ribs and licking his taste right off Bucky’s tongue. He pulls back for a moment, looks at Bucky.

“Bucky your _mouth_ …” He never finishes, eyes riveted to where Bucky’s lips are wet and swollen.  “Put it in me,” he announces, “come on.”

“Jesus christ, you’re a real Jezebel, you know that?  Is this just half a century of sexual frustration or--” Bucky breaks off into a rough hiss when Steve spits into his hand, closes it over Bucky’s prick and guides him right into that same welcome heat.  Bucky sets into him right away, quick snaps of his hips that has Steve bracing against the headboard with both hands. The moulding fractures under his palm, and Bucky feels a vague sense of guilt over that, but it’s chased away by the blinding wash of pleasure detonating at the base of Bucky’s spine.  Bucky pushes in all the way, says, “Fuckfuckfuck _fuck,”_ and lets it go.  

After a few stilted seconds of heavy breathing, Bucky retreats, can’t help but stick his fingers inside of Steve once more, real gentle about it though, and touches his tongue to his bottom lip.

“I’ve made a mess of you,” he says, mouth watering unaccountably.  “Sorry,” and doesn’t even have the decency to sound convincing. Yeah, he’ll have to keep an eye on himself.  That’s definitely some caveman _gotta mark my territory_ bullshit.

“You’re gonna start it all over again,” Steve warns, ears already getting pink again.  “I was serious about the refractory period… in that there’s not one.”

Bucky finally lets his fingers slip away, feels that same smug frisson go through him when a little come leaks down onto the sheets.  He kisses Steve cheeks, his forehead, his mouth, before settling down next to him. Lying down feels funny just because the bed is off balance, but it’s not enough for either of them to actually suggest they get up and move.  Steve snuggles up, lets his head rest over Bucky’s bicep, and Bucky plays with the sweat slicked tips of his blonde hair.

Silence settles easily between them, and Bucky thinks about drifting off to sleep this way.  Fears it because of the nightmares, the thought of lashing out at Steve again grows heavy in his mind.  But he doesn’t want to be alone. And he doesn’t want Steve to be alone. And he isn’t ready for reality to set in.  Just because he’s had a bit of a breakthrough, doesn’t mean the agony of recovery won’t still be there waiting on Bucky to drag himself inch by inch through the convoluted mess of it.

“You said you don’t remember what she looked like,” Steve murmurs, starling Bucky and taking away the familiar dread that was sinking back into his bones.  He turns toward Bucky with tender eyes, “Your mama, I mean. She was beautiful.” He runs his knuckles up Bucky’s shoulder, across his collarbone, puts Bucky’s cheek in his palm.  “You look like her. Got her smile, her eyes. All my favorite things.”

Bucky tries to bring forth the memory of Winifred Barnes, and frowns at the familiar sensation of grasping at fog to form an image, the details wisping beyond his reach.  “I can’t see her at all. I only remember my grandparents. Maybe I was too young, had already begun to forget her face by the time they got to me.”

Steve frowns a little.  “Wish I’d known her better.  She passed pretty soon after you started bringing me around.  But she was a good woman, and she helped raise a good son.” Bucky clenches his teeth automatically, and shakes his head in disagreement.  “You are,” Steve says, in a tone that refuses no other interpretation. “If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be suffering the way you do. All this…all of _this_ isn’t your fault.  I need you to understand that, because I can’t have you trying to leave every time there’s a setback.  You deserve to live, Bucky. Even when you don’t believe that, remember that I _do_ .  I think-- I _hope_ that means something to you. I mean, I want you to have all your own reasons to stay, but if you ever find yourself forgetting those.. Maybe I can be a reason to?”

“You already are,” Bucky whispers.  “Always have been. I just want to protect you.”

“I want to protect you too.” Steve says, idly tucking a few strands of hair behind Bucky’s ear.  “Need you to let me.”

“And for the record, you’d probably do the same thing, if you were me.  You’d be much more noble about it though, disappear and stay disappeared. Tried so hard to keep away from you, but you’re like a damn magnet for me.”

“Well, if roles were reversed, I hope you’d try and stop me too.”  

“Course I would,” Bucky says, every inch of him finds the thought of Steve running off in an attempt at being self-sacrificial, repellant.  Which is unfortunate, because the selflessness required for that to even be an option is a touchstone to Steve’s entire being. It’s almost gotten him killed dozens times.

“You can’t leave,” Steve reiterates firmly, “you can’t, because I need you.”

“I know you do, punk,” Bucky teases, “who else is gonna put up with your toothpaste in the sink and the cabinet doors all left wide open for ants?  Real pain in my ass.”

Steve attempts not to smile, but only succeeds in making Bucky want to kiss him dumb.  “I’m trying to be serious here, jerk.”

“You realize you’re manipulating me, right? You know how hard it is for me to tell you no.”

“Maybe,” Steve admits softly, pulling Bucky in by the nape, kissing him, and Bucky smiles into it.  He slips Bucky enough tongue to feel that precarious switchover into arousal flicker warningly. Steve closes his eyes, murmurs, “Again,” and somewhere inside of Bucky, someplace broken and gnarled and beyond recall--light begins to grow out from between the cracks.

  


\---

**Author's Note:**

> \--
> 
> Okay, so the plan was originally to bring Tony in on all of this, but by the time I got to this point, it honestly seemed like that would be the beginning of another chapter of this story, and I decided to leave this as is--and there's definitely a possibility that I will eventually add a sort of coda, or series edition to this fic.
> 
> \---


End file.
